ssure of foes on all sides,
acted at last like a fierce hammer shaping and hardening resistance
against itself. The fugitive from Poland, the fugitive from the Tatar
and the Turk, homeless, with nothing to lose, their lives ever exposed
to danger, forsook their peaceful occupations and became transformed
into a warlike people, known as the Cossacks, whose appearance towards
the end of the thirteenth century or at the beginning of the fourteenth
was a remarkable event which possibly alone (suggests Gogol) prevented
any further inroads by the two Mohammedan nations into Europe. The
appearance of the Cossacks was coincident with the appearance in Europe
of brotherhoods and knighthood-orders, and this new race, in spite of
its living the life of marauders, in spite of turnings its foes' tactics
upon its foes, was not free of the religious spirit of its time; if it
warred for its existence it warred not less for its faith, which was
Greek. Indeed, as the nation grew stronger and became conscious of its
strength, the struggle began to partake something of the nature of a
religious war, not alone defensive but aggressive also, against the
unbeliever. While any man was free to join the brotherhood it was
obligatory to believe in the Greek faith. It was this religious unity,
blazed into activity by the presence across the borders of unbelieving
nations, that alone indicated the germ of a political body in this
gathering of men, who otherwise lived the audacious lives of a band
of highway robbers. "There was, however," says Gogol, "none of the
austerity of the Catholic knight in them; they bound themselves to no
vows or fasts; they put no self-restraint upon themselves or mortified
their flesh, but were indomitable like the rocks of the Dnieper among
which they lived, and in their furious feasts and revels they forgot
the whole world. That same intimate brotherhood, maintained in robber
communities, bound them together. They had everything in common--wine,
food, dwelling. A perpetual fear, a perpetual danger, inspired them with
a contempt towards life. The Cossack worried more about a good measure
of wine than about his fate. One has to see this denizen of the frontier
in his half-Tatar, half-Polish costume--which so sharply outlined the
spirit of the borderland--galloping in Asiatic fashion on his horse, now
lost in thick grass, now leaping with the speed of a tiger from ambush,
or emerging suddenly from the river or swamp, all cl