'Take, there's no great art in that; Take whatever you can get; What are hands appended to us for If not that we may take, take, take?' all the spectators began to applaud, and many of them, addressing the official who occupied the post corresponding to that of Grabber, shouted his name in unison, and cried, 'That's you! That's you!'" Towards the end of Katherine II.'s reign, a new school, which numbered many young writers, arose. At the head of it, by reason of his ability as a journalist, literary man, poet, and savant, stood Nikolai Mikhailovitch Karamzin (1766-1826). Karamzin was descended from a Tatar princeling, Karamurza, who accepted Christianity in the days of the Tzars of Moscow. He did much to disseminate in society a discriminating taste in literature, and more accurate views in regard to it. During the first half of his sixty years' activity--that under Katherine II.--he was a poet and literary man; during the latter and most considerable part of his career--under Alexander I.--he was a historian. His first work to win him great renown was his "Letters of a Russian Traveler," written after a trip lasting a year and a half to Germany, Switzerland, France, and England, begun in 1789, and published in the "Moscow Journal," which he established in 1791. For the next twelve years Karamzin devoted himself exclusively to journalism and literature. It was his most brilliant literary period, and during it his labors were astonishing in quantity and varied in subject, as the taste of the majority of readers in that period demanded. During this period he was not only a journalist, but also a poet, literary man, and critic. His poetical compositions are rather shallow, and monotonous in form, but were highly esteemed by his contemporaries. They are interesting at the present day chiefly because of their historical and biographical details, as a chronicle of history, and of the heart of a profoundly sincere man. Their themes are, generally, the love of nature, of country life, friendship; together with gentleness, sensibility, melancholy, scorn for rank and wealth, dreams of immortality with posterity. His greatest successes with the public were secured by "Poor Liza," and "Natalya, the Boyar's Daughter," which served as much-admired models for sentimentalism to succeeding generations. Sentimentality was no novelty in Russia; it had come in with translations from English novels, such as Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe," and the like; and imitations of them in Russia. "Sensibility" was held to be the highest quality in human nature, and a man's--much more a woman's--worth was measured by the amount of "sensibility" he or she possessed. This new school paid scant heed to the observation and study of real life. An essential tenet in the cult consisted of a glorification of the distant past, "the good old times," adorned by fancy, as the ideal model for the present; the