of his heart for a virtuous life, he met with contempt and mocking laughter, but every time he was frivolous or wicked, he was praised and encouraged.
Yet on the whole this gay life at St. Petersburg was not altogether useless. It taught him something, and he was not really spoilt by it. He was big enough and intelligent enough to see the utter futility and uselessness of such a life. It gave him, he says, a scorn for aristocracy and the life of rich people generally, whose whole existence was "a mania of selfishness."
Tolstoy's favorite brother Nicholas, who was serving in the Russian army, saw what an unsatisfactory state his brother was in, and so persuaded Leo to become a soldier and join him in the Caucasus. This Leo was only too glad to do. He says in a letter at that time, "God willing, I will amend and become a steady man at last."
Now, the open-air, primitive life in this part of Russia quite restored Tolstoy to himself, and he began to write. His first book, "Childhood," was written and published while he was there. This novel, though not strictly speaking a history of his own childhood, is mostly about his own youthful life; the incidents that occur in it are many of them true, and the characters are taken from friends and relatives. It is a very wonderful book, as showing how vividly Tolstoy remembered his own feelings as a child, how intensely he must have felt and suffered, and what
