We now come to one of the most remarkable lyric productions of our Poet's genius, the "General;" and in order that our readers may be enabled to understand and appreciate this exquisite little poem, we shall preface it with a few remarks of an explanatory character; as the _details_, at least, of the events upon which it is founded may not be so generally known in England as they are in Russia. Our English readers, however, are doubtless sufficiently familiar with the history of the great campaign of the year 1812, which led to the burning of Moscow, and to the consequent annihilation of the mighty army which Napoleon led to perish in the snows of Russia, to remember one remarkable episode connected with that most important campaign. They remember that one of the Russian armies was placed under the command of Field-marshal Barclay de Tolly, a general descended from an ancient Scottish family which had been settled for some generations in Russia, but who was in every respect to be considered as a native Russian, being born a subject of the Tsar, and having, during a long life of service in the Russian army, gradually reached the highest military rank, and acquired a well-earned and universal reputation as an able strategist and a brave man. The mode of operations determined on at the beginning of this most momentous struggle, and persevered in throughout by the Russians, with a patience and steadiness no less admirable than the wisdom of the combinations on which they were founded, was a purely defensive system of tactics. The event amply demonstrated the soundness of the principles upon which those operations were based; for while Napoleon was gradually attracted into the interior of the country by armies which perpetually retired before him without giving him the opportunity of coming to a general action, the autumn was gradually passing away, and the flames of Moscow only served to light up, for the French army, the beginning of their hopeless retreat through a country now totally laid waste, and covered with the snows of a Russian winter. This mode of operations, however, was by no means likely to please the population of Russia, infuriated by the long unaccustomed presence of a hostile army within their sacred frontier, and worked up by all the circumstances of the invasion to the highest pitch of patriotic enthusiasm. Unable to appreciate the value of what must have appeared to them a timid and pusillanimous policy, they overwhelmed Barclay de Tolly with violent accusations of cowardice, and even of treachery; rendered the more plausible to the mind of the ignorant, by the circumstance of their object being a foreigner--or at least of foreign blood. So violent ultimately became these accusations, that although the Field-marshal continued to enjoy the highest confidence and esteem of his sovereign, it was found expedient to allow him to resign the chief command, in which he was succeeded by Kutuzoff. Barclay de Tolly, during the greater