Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/18

 words are used to express a concentrated thought, the sentences are incisive and there is no leaning towards the coquetries of style. Ureche was a fighter first and foremost and a political counsellor of his princes. Through his successor, Miron Costin, some decades later, Poland transmitted the taste for the individual presentation of facts; history degenerates into autobiography, a sort of unrestrained personal chronicle, not directed and controlled by leading ideas; all the caprices of vanity and greed are permissible. His scholastic exercises on the origins of his race bear the same impressionistic seal. But here too, in spite of the Latin-Polish influence of the Jesuit school at J assy, where the sons of Miron Costin and other young men of good family were taught, the Italian current is perceptible. Co-nationals of the Cretan doctors working in Bucharest (possibly Pylarino, the discoverer of the vaccine, who was in the employ of the house of Brâncoveanu, was a Cretan) and of the Cretan merchants were the preacher of the Court, Abramios, and a «iatro-philosopher », Jeremias Cacavela, but the foremost among the learned Roumanians of their time, not excepting the translator of Herodotus, Eustratius, and the initiator of Russia in the field of science, the new champion against the Pope and against Islam, Nicholas Milescu, was the young prince Demetrius Cantemir.

Living at Constantinople in the company of the half-Francized Levantines (in a portrait, almost certainly by a French painter, he wears the white and blue turban of his sovereign masters, with the foulard cravat and the small-sword of Versailles), Cantemir may be considered, notwithstanding his interest in the philosophy of one Van Helmont, a Dutchman, or his relations with the Academy of Berlin, as the herald of French literary characteristics into the Roumanian world. His «Hieroglyphic History»,