Such is the usefulness of history. But everybody ought to know, and this is easily perceived, that history describes not only customs, deeds and occurrences, but also the consequences resulting from them, namely, that the wise, just, kind, brave, constant and faithful are rewarded with honour, glory and well-being, while the vicious, foolish, evildoers, avaricious, cowardly, perverse and faithless will gain eternal dishonour, shame and insult: from which all may learn how desirable it is to obtain the first and avoid the second. Prince Antiókh (Antiochus) Kantemír. (1708-1744.) Antiókh Kantemír was not a Russian by birth. His father, Demetrius, had for a number of years been hospodar of Moldavia. Harassed by the intrigues of a rival at Constantinople, he emigrated with four thousand of his Moldavians to Russia, where he arrived after the unfortunate Prut expedition, in 1711. Himself one of the most accomplished scholars and linguists of Europe, he with the aid of his cultivated Greek wife bestowed the minutest care on the education of his six children. Having arrived in Russia in his third year, Antiókh acquired Russian as his mother tongue, though he also spoke fluently six or seven other languages, and was well versed in Latin and ancient Greek. By education, however, he was anything but a Russian, and his sympathies were naturally directed towards the most extreme reformatory tendencies which Peter the Great advocated for the State and Feofán Prokopóvich for the Church; both of them were not slow in recognising his unusual talents. In 1732 Empress Anna appointed him ambassador to the Court of St. James, and in 1738 he was transferred to Paris, where he passed his short life in communion with Maupertuis, Montesquieu, Abbé Guasco, and others. Besides a few shorter poems and imitations and translations of Anacreon, and an unfinished ode on the death of Peter the Great, Kantemír composed ten satires, of which the one below is the first. It is on these satires that his reputation mainly rests. In style, they are imitations of Boileau and Horace, though never slavish. His language is not always free from Gallicisms, but otherwise it represents the first successful attempt to introduce colloquial Russian into poetry. The chief value of the satires, independently of their literary perfection, lay in their powerful attack on all the contemporary elements of Russian society that were antagonistic to the Western reform. Specimens from several of Kantemír’s satires are given in C. E. Turner’s _Studies in Russian Literature_, London, 1882, and the same article, in Fraser’s Magazine, 1877. Parts of the First Satire, in article on _Russian Literature_, in Foreign Quarterly Review, vol. i. TO MY MIND