But that's very often the case, of course, with men of science among us in Russia.
He came back from abroad and was brilliant in the capacity of lecturer at the university, towards the end of the forties.

He only had time to deliver a few lectures, I believe they were about the Arabs; he maintained, too, a brilliant thesis on the political and Hanseatic importance of the German town Hanau, of which there was promise in the epoch between 1413 and 1428, and on the special and obscure reasons why that promise was never fulfilled.

This dissertation was a cruel and skilful thrust at the Slavophils of the day, and at once made him numerous and irreconcilable enemies among them.

Later on--after he had lost his post as lecturer, however--he published (by way of revenge, so to say, and to show them what a man they had lost) in a progressive monthly review, which translated Dickens and advocated the views of George Sand, the beginning of a very profound investigation into the causes, I believe, of the extraordinary moral nobility of certain knights at a certain epoch or something of that nature.
Some lofty and exceptionally noble idea was maintained in it, anyway.
It was said afterwards that the continuation was hurriedly forbidden and even that the progressive review had to suffer for having printed the first part.

That may very well have been so, for what was not possible in those days?
Though, in this case, it is more likely that there was nothing of the kind, and that the author himself was too lazy to conclude his essay.