"And you, the proud and shameless progeny Of fathers famous for their infamy, You, who with servile heel have trampled down The fragments of great names laid low by chance, You, hungry crowd that swarms about the throne, Butchers of freedom, and genius, and glory, You hide behind the shelter of the law, Before you, right and justice must be dumb! But, parasites of vice, there's God's assize; There is an awful court of law that waits. You cannot reach it with the sound of gold; It knows your thoughts beforehand and your deeds; And vainly you shall call the lying witness; That shall not help you any more; And not with all the filth of all your gore Shall you wash out the poet's righteous blood."
He struck this strong chord more than once, especially in his indictment of his own generation, called "A Thought"; and in a poem written on the transfer of Napoleon's ashes to Paris, in which he pours scorn on the French for deserting Napoleon when he lived and then acclaiming his ashes.
But it is not in poems such as these that Lermontov's most characteristic qualities are to be found. Lermontov owed nothing to his contemporaries, little to his predecessors, and still less to foreign models. It is true that, as a school-boy, he wrote verses full of Byronic disillusion and satiety, but these were merely echoes of his reading. The gloom of spirit which he expressed later on was a permanent and innate feature of his own temperament. Later, the reading of Shelley spurred on his imagination to emulation, but not to imitation. He sought his own path from the beginning, and he remained in it with obdurate persistence. He remained obstinately himself, indifferent as a rule to outside events, currents of thought and feeling. And he clung to the themes which he chose in his youth. His mind to him a kingdom was, and he peopled it with images and fancies of his own devising. The path which he chose was a narrow one. It was a romantic path. He chose for the subject of the poem by which he is perhaps most widely known, _The Demon_, the love of a demon for a woman. The subject is as romantic as any chosen by Thomas Moore; but there is nothing now that appears rococo in Lermontov's work. The colours are as fresh to-day as when they were first laid on. The heroine is a Circassian woman, and the action of the poem is in the Caucasus.