CANTEMIR, Antiochus, the father of Russian poetry, was the youngest son of the preceding, and was born in 1700. Under the ablest professors, whom the czar had invited to Petersburg, he studied mathematics, physics, history, moral philosophy, and polite literature. After completing his academic course, he published in the Russian language a Concordance to the Psalms, and was elected a member of the academy. When only twenty-four years of age he was nominated as minister to the court of Great Britain; and here, as well as in France, whither he went in 1738 as minister plenipotentiary, he was equally admired as a statesman and a man of letters. Subsequently he was ambassador-extraordinary at the courts of Britain and France successively. His wise and prudent conduct in relation to the different revolutions which agitated Russia during his absence, procured him the confidence and esteem of three successive princes. This accomplished man died at Paris in 1744, at the age of forty-four. Besides a Russian translation of Anacreon and the Epistles of Horace, he wrote original satires, odes, and fables, and translated Fontenelle's Plurality of Worlds, and Algarotti's Dialogues on Light and Colours. The Abbé Guasco has written his life in French, and translated his satires into that language.