Students were admitted according to birth and merit only. Pushkin and Gortchakof were the two who most distinguished themselves. The course of study was rather superficial. The students were on intimate terms with the soldiers of the Imperial Guard, and quartered in the imperial palace with them. Politics, patriotism, poetry, all together fomented an agitation, which ended with the conspiracy of December, 1825.
Pushkin was at once recognized as a master in this wild throng, and was already famous as a poet. The old Derzhavin cast his own mantle upon Pushkin's shoulders and pronounced him his heir. Pushkin possessed the gift of pleasing; but to understand his genius, we must not lose sight of his origin. His maternal grandfather was an Abyssinian negro, who had been a slave in the Seraglio of Constantinople, was stolen and carried to Russia by a corsair, and adopted by Peter the Great, who made him a general, and gave him in marriage to a noble lady of the court. The poet inherited some of his grandfather's features; his thick lips, white teeth, and crisp curly hair. This drop of African blood, falling amid Arctic snows, may account for the strong contrasts and exaggerations of his poetic nature, which was a remarkable union of impetuosity and melancholy.
His youth was passed in a wild whirl of pleasure and excess. He incurred while still young the imperial anger, by having written some inso-
