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 centre from which this movement issued, and Brodziriski one
of the foremost defenders of the new principles and the precursor
of Mickiewicz, the appearance of whose ballads, romances,
"Dziady" and "Grazyna" (1822), decided the war in favour of
romanticism. The names of Anton Malczewski, Bogdan Zaleski,
Severyn Goszczynski, and others, ought to be cited along with
that of the more illustrious Mickiewicz, but I will not weary the
reader either with a long disquisition or with a dry enumeration.
I have said above that Polish poetry had become more of a