banks, free-trade, education, agriculture, communal institutions, local self-government, joint-stock companies, and with crushing philippics against personal and national vanity, inordinate luxury, administrative tyranny, and the habitual peculation of the officials.  This last-named subject received special attention.  During the preceding reign any attempt to criticise publicly the character or acts of an official was regarded as a very heinous offence; now there was a deluge of sketches, tales, comedies, and monologues, describing the corruption of the Administration, and explaining the ingenious devices by which the tchinovniks increased their scanty salaries.  The public would read nothing that had not a direct or indirect bearing on the questions of the day, and whatever had such a bearing was read with interest.  It did not seem at all strange that a drama should be written in defence of free-trade, or a poem in advocacy of some peculiar mode of taxation; that an author should expound his political ideas in a tale, and his antagonist reply by a comedy.  A few men of the old school protested feebly against this “prostitution of art,” but they received little attention, and the doctrine that art should be cultivated for its own sake was scouted as an invention of aristocratic indolence.  Here is an ipsa pinxit of the literature of the time:  “Literature has come to look at Russia with her own eyes, and sees that the idyllic romantic personages which the poets formerly loved to describe have no objective existence.  Having taken off her French glove, she offers her hand to the rude, hard-working labourer, and observing lovingly Russian village life, she feels herself in her native land.  The writers of the present have analysed the past, and, having separated themselves from aristocratic litterateurs and aristocratic society, have demolished their former idols.”

By far the most influential periodical at the commencement of the movement was the Kolokol, or Bell, a fortnightly journal published in London by Herzen, who was at that time an important personage among the political refugees.  Herzen was a man of education and culture, with ultra-radical opinions, and not averse to using revolutionary methods of reform when he considered them necessary.  His intimate relations with many of the leading men in Russia enabled him to obtain secret information of the most important and varied kind, and his sparkling wit, biting satire, and clear, terse, brilliant style secured him a large number of readers.  He seemed to know everything that was done in the ministries and even in the Cabinet of the Emperor,* and he exposed most mercilessly every abuse that came to his knowledge.  We who are accustomed to free political discussion can hardly form a conception of the avidity with which his articles were read, and the effect which they produced.  Though strictly prohibited by the Press censure, the Kolokol found its way across the frontier in thousands of copies, and was eagerly perused and commented on by all ranks of the educated classes.  The Emperor himself received it regularly, and high-priced delinquents examined it with fear and trembling.  In this way Herzen was for some years, though an exile, an important political personage, and did much to awaken and keep up the reform enthusiasm.