Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/23

 Metastasio, found in the boyar Slătineanu, a translator for his «Achilles in Schiro ».

The number of students coming from South-Eastern Europe increased, despite the vigilance of the now-alarmed Turk, who required that Roumanians should first ask permission from the Porte to leave for western centres of learning. On their return home they brought with them (in the German centres like Halle and Leipsig they made studies of medicine) foreign books of very diverse characters. Other books were disseminated in Bucharest and Jassy by the Austrian consulates which, Austria having the monopoly of the posts, drove a profitable trade in the sale of French journals and books. Lists of imported works, in which the best and the worst of the market were incontinently mingled, are fortunately extant.

But out of all this no original Roumanian manifestation appeared in the two principalities, as had happened, at least, in all other countries of South-Eastern Europe ; no genuine product of the national psychology occurred. The honour of having done so, however, lies with Roumanian Transylvania as regards the declining years of the eighteenth century. Here, German influence prevailed, due to the Habsburg domination of the province. The conquering emperor, who wrested from the Turks this ancient home of the Roumanian race, which had been occupied by the Hungarians for a thousand years and was later the refuge of Hungarian autonomy, was only responsible for the introduction of soldiers, officials and Jesuits, whose orders were to destroy the Calvinism of the Hungarians, if not Saxon Lutheranism too. Some German elementary schools were set up about 1780, for an exclusively political purpose, providing a German mode of culture, the character of which is to be defined.