c fashions and models; for he paved the way for
Pushkin to render the whole quarrel obsolete by creating models of his
own and by founding a national literature.

Pushkin was born on May 26, 1799, at Moscow. He was of ancient
lineage, and inherited African negro blood on his mother's side, his
mother's grandmother being the daughter of Peter the Great's negro,
Hannibal. Until he was nine years old, he did not show signs of any
unusual precocity; but from then onwards he was seized with a passion
for reading which lasted all his life. He read Plutarch's _Lives_, the
_Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ in a translation. He then devoured all the
French books he found in his father's library. Pushkin was gifted with
a photographic memory, which retained what he read immediately and
permanently. His first efforts at writing were in French,--comedies,
which he performed himself to an audience of his sisters. He went to
school in 1812 at the Lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo, a suburb of St.
Petersburg. His school career was not brilliant, and his leaving
certificate qualifies his achievements as mediocre, even in Russian.
But during the six years he spent at the Lyceum, he continued to read
voraciously. His favourite poet at this time was Voltaire. He began to
write verse, first in French and then in Russian; some of it was
printed in 1814 and 1815 in reviews, and in 1815 he declaimed his
_Recollections of Tsarskoe Selo_ in public at the Lyceum examination,
in the presence of Derzhavin the poet.

The poems which he wrote at school afterwards formed part of his
collected works. In these poems, consisting for the greater part of
anacreontics and epistles, although they are immature, and imitative,
partly of contemporary authors such as Derzhavin and Zhukovsky, and
partly of the French anacreontic school of poets, such as Voltaire,
Gresset and Parny, the sound of a new voice was unmistakable. Indeed,
not only his contemporaries, but the foremost representatives of the
Russian literature of that day, Derzhavin, Karamzin and Zhukovsky,
made no mistake about it. They greeted the first notes of this new
lyre with enthusiasm. Zhukovsky used to visit the boy poet at school
and read out his verse to him. Derzhavin was enthusiastic over the
recitation of his _Recollections of Tsarskoe Selo_. Thus fame came to
Pushkin as easily as the gift of writing verse. He had lisped in
numbers, and as soon as he began to speak in them, his contemporaries
immediately