which is much disputed among scholars : " All our poets of the eighteenth century together had not poetry enough in them to comprehend, still less to compose, a single couplet of this 4 Song of Igor.'"
This epic poetry of Russia strikes its roots in the most remote antiquity of Asia, from Hindu and Persian myths, as well as from those of the Occident. It resembles the race itself in its growth and mode of development, oscillating alternately between the east and the west. Thus has the Russian mind oscillated between the two poles of attraction. In this period of its growth, it remembers and imitates more than it creates ; but the foreign images it receives and reflects assume larger contours and more melan- choly colors ; a tinge of plaintiveness, as well as of brotherly love and sympathy.
Not so with the period we now enter. Literature is now reduced to a restricted form, like the practice of an art, cultivated for itself and following certain rules. It is an edifice constructed by Peter the Great, in which the author becomes a servant of the state, with a set task like the rest of the government officials. All must study in the school of Western Europe, and must accomplish in the eighteenth century what France did in the sixteenth. Even the Slavonic language itself must suffer innovations and adopt foreign terms. Before this, all books were written in
