he will never submit or
yield; but then he died young; and the Russian poets often changed,
and not infrequently adopted a compromise which was the same thing as
submission.

Lermontov was, like Pushkin, essentially a lyric poet, still more
subjective, and profoundly self-centred. His attempts at the drama
(imitations of Schiller and an attempt at the manner of Griboyedov)
were failures. But, unlike Pushkin, he was a true romantic; and his
work proves to us how essentially different a thing Russian
romanticism is from French, German or English romanticism. He began
with astonishing precocity to write verse when he was twelve. His
earliest efforts were in French. He then began to imitate Pushkin.
While at the Cadet School he wrote a series of cleverly written, more
or less indecent, and more or less Byronic--the Byron of
_Beppo_--tales in verse, describing his love adventures, and episodes
of garrison life. What brought him fame was his "Ode on the Death of
Pushkin," which, although unjustified by the actual facts--he
represents Pushkin as the victim of a bloodthirsty society--strikes
strong and bitter chords. Here, without any doubt, are "thoughts that
breathe and words that burn"--

"And you, the proud and shameless progeny
Of fathers famous for their infamy,
You, who with servile heel have trampled down
The fragments of great names laid low by chance,
You, hungry crowd that swarms about the throne,
Butchers of freedom, and genius, and glory,
You hide behind the shelter of the law,
Before you, right and justice must be dumb!
But, parasites of vice, there's God's assize;
There is an awful court of law that waits.
You cannot reach it with the sound of gold;
It knows your thoughts beforehand and your deeds;
And vainly you shall call the lying witness;
That shall not help you any more;
And not with all the filth of all your gore
Shall you wash out the poet's righteous blood."

He struck this strong chord more than once, especially in his
indictment of his own generation, called "A Thought"; and in a poem
written on the transfer of Napoleon's ashes to Paris, in which he
pours scorn on the French for deserting Napoleon when he lived and
then acclaiming his ashes.

But it is not in poems such as these that Lermontov's most
characteristic qualities are to be found. Lermontov owed nothing to
his contemporaries, little to his predecessors, and still less t