a devil of a swell, to be sure." There is no scorn and no satire in
this book; it was written from an overflowing heart. One of the speeches
of the spineless young Russian, Alosha, might be taken as illustrative
of the life-purpose of our novelist: "I am on fire for high and noble
ideals; they may be false, but the basis on which they rest is holy."

"Downtrodden and Oppressed" is full of melodrama and full of tears; it
is four times too long, being stuffed out with interminable
discussions and vain repetitions. It has no beauty of construction, no
evolution, and irritates the reader beyond all endurance. The young
hero is a blazing ass, who is in love with two girls at the same time,
and whose fluency of speech is in inverse proportion to his power of
will. The real problem of the book is how either of the girls could
have tolerated his presence for five minutes. The hero's father is a
melodramatic villain, who ought to have worn patent-leather boots and
a Spanish cloak. And yet, with all its glaring faults, it is a story
the pages of which ought not to be skipped. So far as the narrative
goes, one may skip a score of leaves at will; but in the midst of
aimless and weary gabble, passages of extraordinary beauty and uncanny
insight strike out with the force of a sudden blow. The influence of
Dickens is once more clearly seen in the sickly little girl Nelly,
whose strange caprices and flashes of passion are like Goethe's
Mignon, but whose bad health and lingering death recall irresistibly
Little Nell. They are similar in much more than in name.

Dostoevski told the secrets of his prison-house in his great book
"Memoirs of a House of the Dead"--translated into English with the
title "Buried Alive." Of the many works that have come from
prison-walls to enrich literature, and their number is legion, this is
one of the most powerful, because one of the most truthful and