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88 of opinions had not yet grown into a binding yoke, and when it was still possible to follow the example of Montaigne's old woman, and light one candle to Saint Michael and another to the Dragon. At present, the saint—or perhaps the dragon—stands in a blaze of glory, all the more lustrous for the dark shadow thrown on his antagonist. "Praise handed in by disparagement," the Greek drama whipped upon the back of Genesis,—if I may venture to quote Charles Lamb again—this is the modern method of procedure, a method successfully inaugurated by Macaulay, who could find no better way of eulogizing Addison than by heaping antithetical reproaches upon Steele. In a little volume of lectures upon Russian literature, lectures which were sufficiently popular to bear both printing and delivery, I find the art of persuasiveness illustrated by this firebrand of a sentence, hurled like an anathema at the heads of a peaceful and unoffending community: "Read Tolstoï! Read humbly, read admiringly! Reading him in this spirit shall in itself be unto you an education of your highest artistic nature. And when your souls have