th gained him. The poems of his last days in prison breathe a
spirit of religious humility, and he died forgiving and praying for
his enemies. His name shines in Russian history and Russian
literature, as that of a martyr to a high ideal.

Griboyedov, the author of _Gore ot Uma_, a writer of a very different
order, although not a Decembrist himself, is a product of that period.
His comedy still remains the unsurpassed masterpiece of Russian
comedy, and can be compared with Beaumarchais' _Figaro_ and Sheridan's
_School for Scandal_.

Griboyedov was a Foreign Office official, and he was murdered when
Minister Plenipotentiary at Teheran, on January 30, 1829. He conceived
the plot of his play in 1816, and read aloud some scenes in St.
Petersburg in 1823-24. They caused a sensation in literary circles,
and the play began to circulate rapidly in MSS. Two fragments of the
drama were published in one of the almanacs, which then took the place
of literary reviews. But beyond this, Griboyedov could neither get his
play printed nor acted. Thousands of copies circulated in MSS., but
the play was not produced on the stage until 1831, and then much
mutilated; and it was not printed until 1833.

_Gore ot Uma_ is written in verse, in iambics of varying length, like
Krylov's fables. The unities are preserved. The action takes place in
one day and in the same house--that of Famusov, an elderly gentleman
of the Moscow upper class holding a Government appointment. He is a
widower and has one daughter, Sophia, whose sensibility is greater
than her sense; and the play opens on a scene where the father
discovers her talking to his secretary, Molchalin, and says he will
stand no nonsense. Presently, the friend of Sophia's childhood,
Chatsky, arrives after a three years' absence abroad; Chatsky is a
young man of independent ideas whose misfortune it is to be clever. He
notices that Sophia receives him coldly, and later on he perceives
that she is in love with Molchalin,--a wonderfully drawn type, the
perfect climber, time-server and place-seeker, and the incarnation of
convention,--who does not care a rap for Sophia. Chatsky declaims to
Famusov his contempt for modern Moscow, for the slavish worship by
society of all that is foreign, for its idolatry of fashion and
official rank, its hollowness and its convention. Famusov, the
incarnation of respectable conventionality, does not understand one
word of what he is saying.

At an evening part