text:  Like all men of the higher order of intellect--like Scott like Cervantes and Michael Angelo--Pushkin was endowed by nature with a vigorous and mighty organization bodily as well as mental: and though he may appear to have been losing much valuable time in the elegant frivolities of the drawing-room he was not less industrious at this period of his career in amassing a store of observation derived from a practical study of human character than successful in filling up--in the short intervals of ball and festival--the poetical outlines which he had roughly sketched at the Lyceum