ht up, not too strictly, by "Monsieur l'Abbe"; he goes out in the
world clothed by a London tailor, fluent in French, and able to dance
the Mazurka.

Onegin can touch on every subject, can hold his tongue when the
conversation becomes too serious, and make epigrams. He knows enough
Latin to construe an epitaph, to talk about Juvenal, and put "Vale!"
at the end of his letters, and he can remember two lines of the
_AEneid_. He is severe on Homer and Theocritus, but has read Adam
Smith. The only art in which he is proficient is the _ars amandi_ as
taught by Ovid. He is a patron of the ballet; he goes to balls; he
eats beef-steaks and _pate de foie gras_. In spite of all
this--perhaps because of it--he suffers from spleen, like Childe
Harold, the author says. His father dies, leaving a lot of debts
behind him, but a dying uncle summons him to the country; and when he
gets there he finds his uncle dead, and himself the inheritor of the
estate. In the country, he is just as much bored as he was in St.
Petersburg. A new neighbour arrives in the shape of Lensky, a young
man fresh from Germany, an enthusiast and a poet, and full of Kant,
Schiller, and the German writers. Lensky introduces Onegin to the
neighbouring family, by name Larin, consisting of a widow and two
daughters. Lensky is in love with the younger daughter, Olga, who is
simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a round face, as Onegin says, like the
foolish moon. The elder sister, Tatiana, is less pretty; shy and
dreamy, she conceals under her retiring and wistful ways a clean-cut
character and a strong will.

Tatiana is as real as any of Miss Austen's heroines; as alive as
Fielding's Sophia Western, and as charming as any of George Meredith's
women; as sensible as Portia, as resolute as Juliet. Turgenev, with
all his magic, and Tolstoy, with all his command over the colours of
life, never created a truer, more radiant, and more typically Russian
woman. She is the type of all that is best in the Russian woman; that
is to say, of all that is best in Russia; and it is a type taken
straight from life, and not from fairy-land--a type that exists as
much to-day as it did in the days of Pushkin. She is the first of that
long gallery of Russian women which Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky
have given us, and which are the most precious jewels of Russian
literature, because they reflect the crowning glory of Russian life.
Tatiana falls in love with Onegin at first sight. She writ