constant intercourse with the aristocracy is an item of his
education which must not be considered as of subordinate
importance. More than almost any other of his early disciplines,
it formed his tastes, or at least strongly assisted in developing
certain inborn traits of his nature, and in doing this influenced
his entire moral and artistic character. In the proem I mentioned
an English traveller's encomiums on the elegance in the houses,
and the exquisite refinement in the entertainments, of the
wealthy nobles in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. We
may be sure that in these respects the present century was not
eclipsed by its predecessors, at least not in the third decade,
when the salons of Warsaw shone at their brightest. The influence
of French thought and manners, for the importation and spreading
of which King Stanislas Leszczinski was so solicitous that he
sent at his own expense many young gentlemen to Paris for their
education, was subsequently strengthened by literary taste,
national sympathies, and the political connection during the
first Empire. But although foreign notions and customs caused
much of the old barbarous extravagance and also much of the old
homely simplicity to disappear, they did not annihilate the
national distinctiveness of the class that was affected by them.
Suffused with the Slavonic spirit and its tincture of
Orientalism, the importation assumed a character of its own.
Liszt, who did not speak merely from hearsay, emphasises, in
giving expression to his admiration of the elegant and refined
manners of the Polish aristocracy, the absence of formalism and
stiff artificiality:--

In these salons [he writes] the rigorously observed
proprieties were not a kind of ingeniously-constructed