yet bore no ill-will against his judges, and he consistently vindicated the cause of law and order against revolution. Ill-used by his own country, he yet repaid that ill-usage with the most passionate tenderness. A martyr who endured every extremity of human suffering, he yet remained a cheerful and confirmed optimist. Take him all in all, Feodor Michaelovitch Dostoevsky, the gambler, the epileptic, the convict, stands out as the most pathetic and most Christ-like figure in Russian letters.
II
He was born in a Moscow hospital in 1821—the year of Napoleon's death—the son of a retired army doctor. Belonging to the impoverished nobility from whose ranks the Russian aristocracy are recruited, he was from his childhood inured to privation. He fought his way through the University, and he knew from personal experience the dire straits which he describes in "Crime and Punishment." At twenty-one years of age he emerged as a lieutenant of engineers, but only to resign his commission: he had already discovered his literary vocation. At twenty-three he wrote his first novel, "Poor Folk," which remains one of his
