But the alarming revolutionary ideas bruited from France, and the Napoleonic campaign against Russia, caused a powerful revulsion of feeling toward Germany and away from France. In Germany, however, Young Russia met the same humanistic tendencies and passion for free thought with which France had been gradually impregnating the empire of the Slavs. Add to this the influence of Byron’s poetry, now stirring Europe, and we have the external forces which drove Russia to look at her own self with honest eyes--forces which at length found their literary climax in Pushkin’s giving to his native land a literature which was of the Russians, for the Russians, and by a Russian--a literature born of the Russian spirit, breathing her ideals, speaking her marvellously expressive tongue in new combinations of beauty, and set against a background of her soil and her cities. A further remarkable influence was operating to prepare both Russia and Pushkin for the work of new creation: in the hands of Zhukovski and others who immediately preceded our author, the Russian language began suddenly to assume a flexibility and richness which, as I have intimated, were destined to be still more greatly enlarged by the gifts of Pushkin. The author-to-be wasted no time beginning his career. Even at the age of ten, while an unstudious but omnivorously reading school-boy, he made deft imitations of French verse and the French drama, while at twelve he knew four or five languages and was reading Rousseau, Voltaire, and Molière with avidity. At this age the lad became a pupil in the College Tsarskoïé-Siélo, in 1811, the year of its founding by Alexander I. But while he absorbed enough to cause his wild genius to flourish, he was incorrigible, and always in hot-water--except among his comrades, by whom his dash, impudence, and wit made him to be both admired and feared. When Pushkin was only fifteen, the _European Messenger_ published anonymously a series of clever but obscene Russian verses in the style of Ossian and Parny. The name of the author soon leaked out, however, and when the following year the boy read on a public speech-day a suitable poem entitled “Recollections of Tsarskoïé-Siélo,” he was hailed as a gifted poet. The poetic form was miraculous--the thought, just about what a precocious lad could produce.