office) of Lieutenant-General Inzoff,
substitute in the province of Bessarabia. From this epoch begins the
wandering and unsettled period of the poet's life, which occupies a
space of five years, and concludes with his return to his father's
village of Mikhailovskoe, in the government of Pskoff. The effect upon
the character and genius of Pushkin, of this pilgrim-like existence,
must be considered as in the highest degree favourable: he stored up, in
these wanderings, we may be sure, effects of scenery and traits of human
nature--in fact the rough materials of future poetry. Fortunately for
him, the theatre of his travels was vast enough to enable him to lay in
an ample stock not only of recollections of the external beauties in the
physical world, but also a rich supply of the various characteristics of
national manners. He traversed the whole south of Russia--a district
admirably calculated to strike and to impress the warm and vivid
imagination of our poet; and "he took genial tribute from the wandering
tribes of Bessarabia, and from the merchant inhabitants of Odessa, and
from the classic ruins of the Tauride, and from the dark-blue waves of
the Euxine, and from the wild peaks of the Caucasus."

It was at this epoch of Pushkin's career that the mighty star of Byron
first rose, like some glittering, but irregular comet, above the
literary horizon of Europe. The genius of the Russian poet had far too
many points of resemblance, in many of its most characteristic
peculiarities, with the Muse of the Noble Childe, for us to be surprised
at the circumstance that the new and brilliant productions of Byron
should have a powerful influence on so congenial a mind as was that of
Pushkin. When we allow, therefore, the existence of this influence, nay
more, when we endeavour to appreciate and measure the extent of that
influence; when we essay to express the degree of _aberration_ (to use
the language of the astronomer) produced in the orbit of the great
poetic planet of the North by the approach in the literary hemisphere of
the yet greater luminary of England--we give the strongest possible
denial to a fallacious opinion, useless to the glory of one great man
and injurious to the just fame of the other, viz. that Pushkin can be
called in any sense an _imitator_ of Lord Byron. In many respects, it is
true, there was a strange and surprising analogy between the personal
character, the peculiar tone of thought, nay, even the natur