We now come, chronologically, to a writer who cannot be assigned either to the old sentimental school of Karamzin, or to the new romantic school of which Pushkin was the first and greatest exponent in Russian literature; to a man who stood apart, in a lofty place, all his own, both during his lifetime and in all Russian literary history; whose name is known to every Russian who can read and write, and whose work enjoys in Russia that popularity which the Odyssey did among the ancient Greeks. Ivan Andreevitch Kryloff (1763-1844) began his literary work almost simultaneously with Karamzin, but was not, in the slightest degree, influenced by the style which the latter introduced into Russian literature; and bore himself in no less distant and hostile a manner to the rising romantic school of Pushkin. He was the son of an army officer, who was afterwards in the civil service, a very competent, intelligent man, who left his family in dire poverty at his death. At the age of fifteen, Kryloff produced his first, and very creditable, specimen of his future talent, though obliged, by extreme need, to enter government service at the age of fourteen, at his father's death. He filled several positions in different places at a very meager salary, until the death of his mother (1788), when he resigned and determined to devote himself exclusively to literature. He engaged in journalistic work, became an editor, and soon published a paper of his own. But his real sphere was that of fabulist. In 1803 he offered his first three fables, partly translated, partly worked over from La Fontaine, and from the moment of their publication, his fame as a writer of fables began to grow. But he wrote two comedies and a fairy-opera before, in 1808, he finally devoted himself to fables, to which branch of literature he remained faithful as long as he lived. By 1811-1812 his fables were so popular that he was granted a government pension, and became a member of the Empress Marya Feodorovna's circle of court poets and literary men. From 1812-1840, or later, Kryloff had an easy post in the Imperial Public Library, and in the course of forty years, wrote about two hundred fables. He is known to have been extremely indolent and untidy; but all his admirers, and even his enemies, recognized in him a power which not one of his predecessors in the literary sphere had possessed--a power which was thoroughly national, bound in the closest manner to the Russian soil. His fables bear an almost family likeness to the proverbs, aphorisms, adages, and tales produced by the wisdom of the masses, and are quite in their spirit. All the Russian poets had tried their hand at that favorite form of poetic composition--the fable--ever since its introduction from western Europe, in the eighteenth century; and Kryloff's success called forth innumerable imitators. But up to that time, out of all the sorts of poetry existing in Russian literature,