st day he wears it, it is stolen. He dies of melancholia, and his
ghost haunts the streets. This story is the only begetter of the large
army of pathetic figures of failure that crowd the pages of Russian
literature.

While Gogol had been writing and publishing these tales, he had also
been steadily writing for the stage; but here the great difficulty and
obstacle was the Censorship, which was almost as severe as it was in
England at the end of the reign of Edward VII. But, by a curious
paradox, the play, which you would have expected the Censorship to
forbid before all other plays, _The Revisor_, or _Inspector-General_,
was performed. This was owing to the direct intervention of the
Emperor. _The Revisor_ is the second comic masterpiece of the Russian
stage. The plot was suggested to Gogol by Pushkin. The officials of an
obscure country town hear the startling news that a Government
Inspector is arriving incognito to investigate their affairs. A
traveller from St. Petersburg--a fine natural liar--is taken for the
Inspector, plays up to the part, and gets away just before the arrival
of the real Inspector, which is the end of the play. The play is a
satire on the Russian bureaucracy. Almost every single character in it
is dishonest; and the empty-headed, and irrelevant hero, with his
magnificent talent for easy lying, is a masterly creation. The play
at once became a classic, and retains all its vitality and comic force
to-day. There is no play which draws a larger audience on holidays in
St. Petersburg and Moscow.

After the production of _The Revisor_, Gogol left Russia for ever and
settled in Rome. He had in his mind a work of great importance on
which he had already been working for some time. This was his _Dead
Souls_, his most ambitious work, and his masterpiece. It was Pushkin
who gave him the idea of the book. The hero of the book, Chichikov,
conceives a brilliant idea. Every landlord possessed so many serfs,
called "souls." A revision took place every ten years, and the
landlord had to pay for poll-tax on the "souls" who had died during
that period. Nobody looked at the lists between the periods of
revision. Chichikov's idea was to take over the dead souls from the
landlord, who would, of course, be delighted to be rid of the
fictitious property and the real tax, to register his purchases, and
then to mortgage at a bank at St. Petersburg or Moscow, the "souls,"
which he represented as being in some place in t