remembrance of his former power and rights and became insensible to
his state of moral degradation, to which the foreign notions, the vain
and frivolous character of most of the poets of the day, had not a
little contributed.

After the thirty years' war, the Silesian poets became remarkable for
Gallomania or the slavish imitation of those of France. Unbounded
adulation of the sovereign, bombastical _carmina_ on occasion of the
birth, wedding, accession, victories, fetes, treaties of peace, and
burial of potentates, love-couplets equally strained, twisted
compliments to female beauty, with pedantic, often indecent, citations
from ancient mythology, chiefly characterized this school of poetry.
Martin Opitz, A.D. 1639, the founder of the first Silesian school,[1]
notwithstanding the insipidity of the taste of the day, preserved the
harmony of the German ballad. His most distinguished followers were
Logau, celebrated for his Epigrams;[2] Paul Gerhard, who, in his fine
hymns, revived the force and simplicity of Luther; Flemming, a genial
and thoroughly German poet, the companion of Olearius[3] during his
visit to Persia; the gentle Simon Dach, whose sorrowing notes bewail
the miseries of the age. He founded a society of melancholy poets at
Koenigsberg, in Prussia, the members of which composed elegies for each
other; Tscherning and Andrew Gryphius, the Corneille of Germany, a
native of Glogau, whose dramas are worthy of a better age than the
insipid century in which they were produced. The life of this
dramatist was full of incident. His father was poisoned; his mother
died of a broken heart. He wandered over Germany during the thirty
years' war, pursued by fire, sword, and pestilence, to the latter of
which the whole of his relations fell victims. He travelled over the
whole of Europe, spoke eleven languages, and became a professor at
Leyden, where he taught history, geography, mathematics, physics, and