our mothers' lips.





II

GOGOL





Nikolai Vassilievich Gogol was born at Sorotchinetz, in Little Russia,
in March, 1809. The year in which he appeared on the planet proved to
be the literary annus mirabilis of the century; for in that same
twelvemonth were born Charles Darwin, Alfred Tennyson, Abraham
Lincoln, Poe, Gladstone, and Holmes. His father was a lover of
literature, who wrote dramatic pieces for his own amusement, and who
spent his time on the old family estates, not in managing the farms,
but in wandering about the fields, and beholding the fowls of the air.
The boy inherited much from his father; but, unlike Turgenev, he had
the best of all private tutors, a good mother, of whom his biographer
says, Elle demeure toujours sa plus intime amie.*

*For the facts in Gogol's life, I have relied chiefly on the doctor's
thesis by Raina Tyrneva, Aix, 1901.

At the age of twelve, Nikolai was sent away to the high school at