When Russia was rediscovered by England in the middle of the sixteenth century and the Muscovy Company established itself at Moscow, there was naturally a demand for Englishmen who could speak Russian. There are frequent references in native reports to Englishmen who spoke and wrote Russian fluently and who were even used as ambassadors to the Muscovite Tsars. It was also an Englishman, Richard James, who, in 1619, made the first collection of Russian popular songs. In 1696, the first Russian grammar was published by the Oxford University Press, though its author, Ludolf, was not an Englishman by birth. In the eighteenth century, there seems to have been in England no interest in Russia except as to its religion, which received consideration from certain divines. An exception must be made in the case of W. Coxe, who in his _Travels in Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark_, 1st edition, London, 1784, gave an excellent account of Russian Literature from German and French sources. In 1821, Sir John Bowring startled his countrymen with his _Specimens of the Russian Poets_, which for the first time revealed to them the existence of a promising literature. Though his knowledge of Russian was quite faulty, as his translations prove, yet he put the poems into such pleasing verses that they became deservedly popular. A second edition followed the same year, and a second part two years later. The impulse given by Sir John Bowring found a ready response in the periodic press of that time. In 1824 the Westminster Review brought out an article on _Politics and Literature of Russia_, which gave a short review of eighteenth-century literature. In 1827, R. P. Gillies gave a good sketch of _Russian Literature_ in vol. i of the Foreign Quarterly Review, based on the Russian work of Grech. The same year, the Foreign Review brought out a short account, and the next year an elaborate article on _Russian Literature and Poetry_, also after Grech, which for some decades formed the basis of all the articles and chapters dealing with the same subject in the English language. The Foreign Quarterly Review brought out similar matter in vol. viii, xxi, xxiii, xxix, xxx. But more interesting than these, which are nearly all fashioned after some Russian articles, are the excellent literary notes in every number, that kept the readers informed on the latest productions that appeared in Russia. There seems hardly to have been a public for these notes in England, and indeed they get weaker with the twenty-fourth volume, and die of inanity in the thirtieth. This early period of magazine articles is brought to an end by _Russian Literary Biography_, in vol. xxxvi (1841) of the Westminster Review.