the country people hardly knew such a thing as bread, many
had never in their life tasted such a delicacy; few villages
had an oven. A weaving-loom was rare; the spinning-wheel
unknown. The main article of furniture, in this bare scene of
squalor, was the crucifix and vessel of holy-water under
it....It was a desolate land without discipline, without law,
without a master. On 9,000 English square miles lived 500,000
souls: not 55 to the square mile. [Footnote: Carlyle.
Frederick the Great, vol. x., p. 40.]

And this poverty and squalor were not to be found only in one
part of Poland, they seem to have been general. Abbe de Mably
when seeing, in 1771, the misery of the country (campagne) and
the bad condition of the roads, imagined himself in Tartary.
William Coxe, the English historian and writer of travels, who
visited Poland after the first partition, relates, in speaking of
the district called Podlachia, that he visited between Bjelsk and
Woyszki villages in which there was nothing but the bare walls,
and he was told at the table of the ------ that knives, forks, and
spoons were conveniences unknown to the peasants. He says he
never saw--

a road so barren of interesting scenes as that from Cracow to
Warsaw--for the most part level, with little variation of
surface; chiefly overspread with tracts of thick forest;
where open, the distant horizon was always skirted with wood
(chiefly pines and firs, intermixed with beech, birch, and
small oaks). The occasional breaks presented some pasture-
ground, with here and there a few meagre crops of corn. The
natives were poorer, humbler, and more miserable than any