by the rivers and ponds in which despairing heroines had drowned themselves.  People talked, wrote, and meditated about “the sympathy of hearts created for each other,” “the soft communion of sympathetic souls,” and much more of the same kind.  Sentimental journeys became a favourite amusement, and formed the subject of very popular books, containing maudlin absurdities likely to produce nowadays mirth rather than tears.  One traveller, for instance, throws himself on his knees before an old oak and makes a speech to it; another weeps daily on the grave of a favourite dog, and constantly longs to marry a peasant girl; a third talks love to the moon, sends kisses to the stars, and wishes to press the heavenly orbs to his bosom!  For a time the public would read nothing but absurd productions of this sort, and Karamzin, the great literary authority of the time, expressly declared that the true function of Art was “to disseminate agreeable impressions in the region of the sentimental.”

The love of French philosophy vanished as suddenly as the inordinate admiration of the French pseudo-classical literature.  When the great Revolution broke out in Paris the fashionable philosophic literature in St. Petersburg disappeared.  Men who talked about political freedom and the rights of man, without thinking for a moment of limiting the autocratic power or of emancipating their serfs, were naturally surprised and frightened on discovering what the liberal principles could effect when applied to real life.  Horrified by the awful scenes of the Terror, they hastened to divest themselves of the principles which led to such results, and sank into a kind of optimistic conservatism that harmonised well with the virtuous sentimentalism in vogue.  In this the Empress herself gave the example.  The Imperial disciple and friend of the Encyclopaedists became in the last years of her reign a decided reactionnaire.

During the Napoleonic wars, when the patriotic feelings were excited, there was a violent hostility to foreign intellectual influence; and feeble intermittent attempts were made to throw off the intellectual bondage.  The invasion of the country in 1812 by the Grande Armee, and the burning of Moscow, added abundant fuel to this patriotic fire.  For some time any one who ventured to express even a moderate admiration for French culture incurred the risk of being stigmatised as a traitor to his country and a renegade to the national faith.  But this patriotic fanaticism soon evaporated, and exaggerations of the ultra-national party became the object of satire and parody.  When the political danger was past, and people resumed their ordinary occupations, those who loved foreign literature returned to their old favourites—­or, as the ultra-patriots called it, to their “wallowing in the mire”—­simply because the native literature did not supply them with what they desired.  “We are quite ready,” they said to their upbraiders, “to admire your great works as soon as they appear, but in the meantime please allow us to enjoy what we possess.”  Thus in the last years of the reign of Alexander I. the patriotic opposition to West European literature gradually ceased, and a new period of unrestricted intellectual importation began.