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Rh of Homer is most admirable. He also wrote several poems in the style of Schiller, Goethe, and Uhland ; and many compositions, ballads, etc., all in the German style. He touched upon many Russian subjects, themes which Pushkin afterwards took up. In fact, he was to Pushkin what Perugino was to Raphael ; yet every Russian will declare that the new romanticism of that time dates from Pushkin, and is identified with him. Zhukovski was one of those timid spirits which are born to be satellites, even though they rise before the sun in the pale dawn ; but they only shine with reflected light, and their lustre becomes wholly absorbed in the rays of the rising luminary which replaces them.

To realize the importance of the part the poets of this period were destined to play, we must remember what a very small part of the population of this vast country could be called the educated class. At the beginning of the century, the education of the Muscovite aristocracy was confided entirely to the Jesuits, who had been powerfully supported by the Emperor Paul. In 1811, Alexander I. replaced these foreign educators by native Russians, and founded the Lyceum of Tsarskoe-Selo, after the model of the Paris Lyceums.