the fashion has passed is evident
enough, and it is also evident that the
craving for these books was largely
a fashion. Nevertheless, the fashion
itself was due to the real power which
those stories revealed, and which con-
stitutes their lasting contribution to
the world's literature. They were
touched with a profound sadness,
which was exhaled like a mist by the
conditions they portrayed; they were
full of a sympathy born of knowledge
and of sorrow; their roots were in
the rich soil of the life they described.
The latest of them, Count Tolstoi's
"Master and Man," is one of those
masterpieces which take rank at once,
not by reason of their magnitude, but
by reason of a certain beautiful quality
which comes only to the man whose
heart is pressed against the heart of
his theme, and who divines what life

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