habits, and encouragement of their father, cannot
but have been greatly influenced and strengthened by the characters and
conversation of such visitors. And let it not be overlooked that
this was the time of Poland's intellectual renascence--a time when the
influence of man over man is greater than at other times, he being, as
it were, charged with a kind of vivifying electricity. The
misfortunes that had passed over Poland had purified and fortified the
nation--breathed into it a new and healthier life. The change which the
country underwent from the middle of the eighteenth to the earlier
part of the nineteenth century was indeed immense. Then Poland, to
use Carlyle's drastic phraseology, had ripened into a condition
of "beautifully phosphorescent rot-heap"; now, with an improved
agriculture, reviving commerce, and rising industry, it was more
prosperous than it had been for centuries. As regards intellectual
matters, the comparison with the past was even more favourable to
the present. The government that took the helm in 1815 followed the
direction taken by its predecessors, and schools and universities
flourished; but a most hopeful sign was this, that whilst the epoch of
Stanislas Augustus was, as Mickiewicz remarked (in Les Slaves), little
Slavonic and not even national, now the national spirit pervaded the
whole intellectual atmosphere, and incited workers in all branches of
science and art to unprecedented efforts. To confine ourselves to one
department, we find that the study of the history and literature of
Poland had received a vigorous impulse, folk-songs were zealously
collected, and a new school of poetry, romanticism, rose victoriously
over the fading splendour of an effete classicism. The literature of
the time of Stanislas was a court and salon literature, and under the
influence of France and ancient Rome. The literature that began to
bud about 1815, and whose germs are to be sought for in the preceding
revolutionary time, was more of a people's literature, and under the
influence of Germany, England, and Russia. The one was a hot-house
plant, the other a garden flower, or even a wild flower. The classics
swore by the precepts of Horace and Boileau, and held that among
the works of Shakespeare there was not one veritable tragedy. The
romanticists, on the other hand, showed by their criticisms and works
that their sympathies were with Schiller, Goethe, Burger, Byron,
Shukovski, &c. Wilna was the chief