text:  That giant hand which broke down the long impregnable dike which had hitherto separated Russia from the rest of Europe and admitted the arts the learning and the civilization of the West to rush in with so impetuous a flood fertilizing as it came but also destroying and sweeping away something that was valuable much that was national--that hand was unavoidably too heavy and too strong to nurse the infant seedling of literature; and the command and example of Peter perhaps rather favoured the imitation of what was good in other languages than the production of originality in his own