itch, afterwards the Emperor Nicholas
I.), and his fortune was assured. His career during the last twenty-five
years of his life, beginning with 1817, belongs to history rather than
to literature. In 1853, wealthy, loaded with imperial favors, richly
pensioned, he went abroad, and settled in Baden-Baden, where he married
(being at the time sixty years of age, while his bride was nineteen),
and never returned to Russia. During the last eleven years of his
semi-invalid life, with disordered nerves, he approached very close to
mysticism.[9]

Batiushkoff, as a poet, was the exact opposite of Zhukovsky, being the
first to grasp the real significance of the mood of the ancient
classical poets, and to appropriate not only their views on life and
enjoyment, but even their plastic and thoroughly artistic mode of
expression. While Zhukovsky removed poetry from earth and rendered it
ethereal, Batiushkoff fixed it to earth and gave it a body,
demonstrating all the entrancing charm of tangible reality. Yet, in
language, point of view, and literary affiliations, he belongs, like
Zhukovsky, to the school of Karamzin. But his versification, his
subject-matter are entirely independent of all preceding influences. In
beauty of versification and plastic worth, Batiushkoff had no
predecessors in Russian literature, and no competitors in the school of
Karamzin. He was of ancient, noble family, well educated, and began to
publish at the age of eighteen.

We now come, chronologically, to a writer who cannot be assigned either
to the old sentimental school of Karamzin, or to the new romantic school
of which Pushkin was the first and greatest exponent in Russian
literature; to a man who stood apart, in a lofty place, all his own,
both during his lifetime and in all Russian literary history; whose name
is known to every Russian who can read and write, and whose work enjoys
in Russia that popularity which the Odyssey did among the ancient
Greeks. Ivan Andreevitch Kryloff (1763-1844) began his literary work
almost simultaneously with Karamzin, but was not, in the slightest
degree, influenced by the style which the latter introduced into Russian
literature; and bore himself in no less distant and hostile a manner to
the rising romantic school of Pushkin. He was the son of an army
officer, who was afterwards in the civil service, a very competent,
intelligent man, who left his family in dire poverty at his death. At
the age of fifteen, Kryloff pro