Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/313

Rh LITERATURE.] POLAND 301 of its personalities. A great partisan of the Catholics in the time of Sigismund III. was Caspar Miaskowski, whose Waleta Wloszczonowska (&quot;Farewell to his Native Country&quot;) deserves mention. Szarzyriski, who died young in 1581, deserves notice as having introduced the sonnet to the Poles. This species of poetry was afterward to be carried to great perfection by Mickiewicz and Gaszynski. lymono- Szymonowicz (1554-1624) was a writer of good pas- &quot; cz - torals. Although they are imitated from classical writers, he has introduced many scenes of national life, which he describes with much vigour. Among the best are &quot;The Lovers,&quot; &quot;The Reapers,&quot; and &quot;The Cake&quot; (Kdacz). Mickiewicz is very loud in his praise, and considers him one of the best followers of Theocritus. The condition, however, of the Polish peasants was too miserable to admit of their being easily made subjects for bucolic poetry. There is an artificial air about the idyls of Szymonowicz which makes one feel too keenly that they are productions of the Renaissance ; one of their best features is the humane spirit towards the miserable peasantry which they everywhere display. Another ex cellent writer of pastorals was Zimorowicz, a native of Lemberg, who died at the early age of twenty-five. Some of his short lyrics are very elegant, and remind us of Herrick and Carew, e.g., that beginning &quot; Ukochana Lancelloto ! Ciebie nio prosze. o ztoto.&quot; Another writer of pastorals, but not of equal merit, was Jan Gawinski, a native of Cracow. Some good Latin poetry was written by Casimir Sarbiewski, better known in the west of Europe as Sarbievius (d. 1640). He was considered to have approached Horace more nearly than any other modern poet, and a gold medal was given him by Pope Urban VIII. Martin Kromer (1512-1589) wrote a history of Poland in thirty books, and another volume, giving a description of the country and its institutions, both in Latin. The history is written in an easy style and is a work of great merit. A poet of some importance was Klonowicz (1545-1602), who Latinized his name into Acernus, Klon being the Polish for maple, and wrote in both Latin and Polish. Sometimes he is descriptive, as in his Polish poem entitled Flis (&quot; The Boatman &quot;), in which he gives a detailed account of the scenery on the banks of the Vistula. There is some poetry in this composition, but it alternates with very prosaic details. In another piece, Rhoxolania, in Latin, he describes the beauties of Galicia. Occasionally he is didactic, as in Worek Judaszow (&quot; The Bag of Judas &quot;) and Victoria Deorum, where, under the allegory of the gods of Olympus, he represents the struggles of parties in Poland, not without severely satirizing the nobility and ecclesiastics. A curious work called Quincunx, written by Orzechowski, is concerned with religious pol emics. Andrew Modrzewski, a Protestant, in his work De RepuUica Emendanda (1551), recommended the establishment of a national church which should be independent of Rome, something upon the model of the Anglican. Sarga. A florid Jesuitical style of oratory became very popular in the time of Sigismund III., not without rhetorical power, but frequently becoming tawdry. The chief repre sentative of this school was Peter Skarga, one of the main agents in extirpating Calvinism in Poland and the Greek Church in Lithuania. Among his numerous writings may be mentioned Lives of the Saints, Discourses on the Seven Sacraments, and especially his sermons preached before the diet, in which he lashed the Poles for their want of patriotism and prophesied the downfall of the country. Mecherzynski, in his &quot; History of Eloquence in Poland &quot; (Historya Wymowy w Polsce), especially praises his two funeral sermons on the burial of Anna Jagieltonka, widow of Stephen Batory, and Anna of Austria, first wife of Sigismund III. Besides the Latin histories of Wapowski and Gwagnin (Guagnini, of Italian origin), we have the first historical work in Polish by Martin Bielski, a Pro testant, viz., Kronika Polska, which was afterwards con tinued by his son. The author was born in 1495 on his father s estate, Biata, and was educated, like so many other of his illustrious contemporaries, at the university of Cra cow. He lived to the age of eighty ; but, however great were the merits of his Chronicle, it was long considered a suspicious book on account of the leanings of the author to Calvinism. After his death his work was continued by his son Joachim (1540-1599). There is also a Chronicle by Bartholomew Paprocki. In 1582 was also published the Chronicle of Stryjkowski, full of curious learning, and still of great use to the student of history. Five years later appeared the Annales Polonise of Sarnicki. The last three works are in Latin. A few words may be said here about the spread of Spread Protestantism in Poland, which is so intimately mixed up of Pr - with the development of the national language. The * estant ~ doctrines of Huss had entered the country in very early times, and we find Polish recensions of Bohemian hymns ; even the hymn to the Virgin previously mentioned is sup posed to have a Czech basis. The bishops were soon active against those who refused to conform to the doctrines of the Roman Church. Thus we find that Bishop Andrew of Bnin seized five Hussite priests and caused them to be burnt in the market of Posen in 1439. A hundred years afterwards a certain Katharina Malcher, on account of her Utraquist opinions, was condemned by Gamrat, the bishop of Cracow, to be burnt, which sentence was accordingly carried out in the ragmarket at Cracow. As early as 1530 Lutheran hymns were sung in the Polish language at Thorn. In Konigsberg John Seklucyan, a personal friend of Luther, published a collection of Christian Songs. He was born in Great Poland, and was at first a Roman Catholic priest in Posen, but afterwards embraced the Protestant faith and was invited by Duke Albert as a preacher to Konigsberg, where he died in 1578. He exe cuted the first translation of the New Testament in 1551. Four years afterwards appeared a complete Polish Bible published by Scharffenberg at Cracow. In 1553 appeared at Brzes &amp;lt;5 the Protestant translation of the whole Bible made by a committee of learned men and divines, and published at the expense of Nicholas Radziwilt, a very rich Polish magnate who had embraced the Protestant doctrines. This book is now of great rarity because his son Christopher, having been induced to become a Roman Catholic by the Jesuit Skarga, caused all copies of his father s Bible which he could find to be burnt. One, how ever, is to be seen in the Bodleian Library, and another in the library of Christ Church, at Oxford. A Socinian Bible was issued by Simon Budny in 1570 at Nieswiez, as he professed to find many faults in the version issued under the patronage of Radziwill; in 1597 ap peared the Roman Catholic version of the Jesuit Wujek ; and in 1632 the so-called Dantzic Bible, which is in use among Protestants and is still the most frequently reprinted. Up to this time Polish literature, although frequently Macaronic rhetorical and too much tinctured with classical influences, period, had still exhibited signs of genius. But now, owing to the frivolous studies introduced by the Jesuits, the so-called macaronic period supervened, which lasted from 1606 to 1764, and was a time of great degradation for the language and literature. The former was now mixed with Latin and classical expressions ; much of the literature consists of fulsome panegyric, verses written on the marriages and funerals of nobles, with conceits and fantastic ideas, devoid of all taste, drawn from their