make an impressive contrast, the Russian critic is here unfair to
Tolstoi, but there is perhaps some truth in the Tolstoi paradox. No
wonder Dostoevski loved children, for he was himself a great child.

He was brought up on the Bible and the Christian religion. The
teachings of the New Testament were with him almost innate ideas.
Thus, although his parents could not give him wealth, or ease, or
comfort, or health, they gave him something better than all four put
together.

When he was twenty-seven years old, having impulsively expressed
revolutionary opinions at a Radical Club to which he belonged, he was
arrested with a number of his mates, and after an imprisonment of some
months, he was led out on the 22 December 1849, with twenty-one
companions, to the scaffold. He passed through all the horror of
dying, for visible preparations had been made for the execution, and
he was certain that in a moment he would cease to live. Then came the
news that the Tsar had commuted the sentence to hard labour; this
saved their lives, but one of the sufferers had become insane.

Then came four years in the Siberian prison, followed by a few years
of enforced military service. His health actually grew better under
the cruel regime of the prison, which is not difficult to understand,
for even a cruel regime is better than none at all, and Dostoevski
never had the slightest notion of how to take care of himself. At what
time his epilepsy began is obscure, but this dreadful disease
faithfully and frequently visited him during his whole adult life.
From a curious hint that he once let fall, reenforced by the manner in
which the poor epileptic in "The Karamazov Brothers" acquired the
falling sickness, we cannot help thinking that its origin came from a