He also wrote poems and fables in the conventional form which repeated the same ideas for the common people. Such subjects as the _Blessed Herod_ and the _Poor Quail_ show the way in which he popularized his ideas. Fables and similar poems had been cultivated as a literary form at the Academy of Kiev and Skovoroda turned it into a living form of writing. His dialogues and essays on literature have been lost but they showed an appreciation, we are told, of the real nature of the Ukrainian language and accent. Yet Skovoroda was not an epoch maker in any way. He valued the vernacular speech but he was still too much under the influence of his training to use it in place of the stilted and artificial language which was then current in Ukrainian letters. He still preferred to write in that artificial mixture of Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and Church Slavonic that was the language taught at the Academy and as a result his writings passed into that oblivion which did not concern him at all. He had not cared whether or not they were published. It would not bother him, if they were forgotten, for they were but a subsidiary part of his work. With his unmystical and individualistic religion and ethics, Skovoroda fits well into the picture of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, as it appeared in various countries of Europe. He was sharply opposed to the elegant scepticism of Voltaire which had become the ruling fashion in many of the European courts. He was nearer to the Deists and to certain eighteenth century Protestant theologians and on one side of his being, he was of that group of eighteenth century thinkers and scholars as Benjamin Franklin, Mikhail Lomonosov, and Dositej Obradovich who laid the foundation for the nineteenth century and the beginnings of Romanticism. On the other side, he belonged rather with a group of Slavonic thinkers of all ages, as the Czech Peter Chelcicky and later in part Leo Tolstoy, who sought to avoid the evils of the world by living an existence apart from it. These men had a vision of an ideal existence to be secured by extreme simplification and abstention from the affairs of the world in the interest of a higher and a different utility.