of manhood, anywhere between thirty and forty years of age.  Everything about him was colossal, and he was full of a primitive exuberance and strength.  I never gathered that he set much store by my acquaintance.  Indeed, he did not seem to care for merely intellectual men; what he demanded was men of reckless energy.  As I afterwards perceived, theory in this case had more weight with him than purely personal sentiment; and he talked much and expatiated freely on the matter.  His general mode of discussion was the Socratic method, and he seemed quite at his ease when, stretched on his host’s hard sofa, he could argue discursively with a crowd of all sorts of men on the problems of revolution.  On these occasions he invariably got the best of the argument.  It was impossible to triumph against his opinions, stated as they were with the utmost conviction, and overstepping in every direction even the extremest bounds of radicalism.  So communicative was he, that on the very first evening of our meeting he gave me full details about the various stages of his development, he was a Russian officer of high birth, but smarting under the yoke of the narrowest martial tyranny, he had been led by a study of Rousseau’s writings to escape to Germany under pretence of taking furlough.  In Berlin he had flung himself into the study of philosophy with all the zest of a barbarian newly awakened to civilisation.  Hegel’s philosophy was the one which was the rage at that moment, and he soon became such an expert in it, that he had been able to hurl that master’s most famous disciples from the saddle of their own philosophy, in a thesis couched in terms of the strictest Hegelian dialectic.  After he had got philosophy off his chest, as he expressed it, he proceeded to Switzerland, where he preached communism, and thence wandered over France and Germany back to the borderland of the Slav world, from which quarter he looked for the regeneration of humanity, because the Slavs had been less enervated by civilisation.  His hopes in this respect were centred in the more strongly pronounced Slav type characteristic of the Russian peasant class.  In the natural detestation of the Russian serf for his cruel oppressor the nobleman, he believed he could trace a substratum of simple-minded brotherly love, and that instinct which leads animals to hate the men who hunt them.  In support of this idea he cited the childish, almost demoniac delight of the Russian people in fire, a quality on which Rostopschin calculated in his strategic burning of Moscow.  He argued that all that was necessary to set in motion a world-wide movement was to convince the Russian peasant, in whom the natural goodness of oppressed human nature had preserved its most childlike characteristics, that it was perfectly right and well pleasing to God for them to burn their lords’ castles, with everything in and about them.  The least that could result from such a movement would be the destruction of all those things which, rightly