He did much to disseminate in society a discriminating taste in literature, and more accurate views in regard to it.

During the first half of his sixty years' activity--that under Katherine II .-- he was a poet and literary man; during the latter and most considerable part of his career--under Alexander I .-- he was a historian.

His first work to win him great renown was his "Letters of a Russian Traveler," written after a trip lasting a year and a half to Germany, Switzerland, France, and England, begun in 1789, and published in the "Moscow Journal," which he established in 1791.

For the next twelve years Karamzin devoted himself exclusively to journalism and literature.

It was his most brilliant literary period, and during it his labors were astonishing in quantity and varied in subject, as the taste of the majority of readers in that period demanded.