Not by stealing or ruining men.
No, he took his oath to that: That God had sent all this wealth to his house, And that he feared not, in the least, to be convicted of injustice towards his neighbor.
And to please the Lord for this, His mercy, And to incline Him unto favors in time to come-- Or, possibly, just to soothe his conscience-- The Skinflint took it into his head to build a house for the poor.
The house was built, and almost finished.

My Skinflint, gazing at it, Beside himself with joy, cheers up and reasons with himself.
How great a service he to the poor hath rendered, in ordering a refuge to be built for them! Thus was my Skinflint inwardly exulting over his house.
Then one of his acquaintances chanced along.
The Skinflint said, with rapture, to his friend, 'I think a great lot of the poor can be housed here!' 'Of course, a great many can live here; But you cannot get in all whom you've sent wandering homeless o'er the earth!'" One of Khemnitzer's most intimate friends, and also one of the most notable members of Derzhavin's circle (being related to the latter through his wife), was Vasily Vasilievitch Kapnist (1757-1824), whose ancestors had been members of an Italian family, the Counts Capnissi.

He owed his fame chiefly to his ode on "Slavery" (1783); to another, "On the Extirpation in Russia of the Vocation of Slave by the Empress Katherine II." (1786); and to a whole series celebrating the conquests of the Russian arms in Turkey and Italy.

But far more important are his elegies and short lyrics, many of which are really very light and graceful; and his translations of "The Monument," from Horace, which was quite equal to Derzhavin's, or even Pushkin's.

His masterpiece was the comedy "Yabeda" (Calumny), which was written probably at the end of Katherine's reign, and was printed under Paul I., in 1798.