school for purifying and elevating the national language and literary taste, and also as a means of correcting vice by ridiculing it.  In this view several clergymen wrote for the theatre.  The Jesuit Bohomolec wrote the first original comedies in 1757; other comedies, valuable as pictures of the time, were written by bishop Kossakowski.  Prince Czartoryski we have mentioned above as a writer of dramas.  Zablocki, Lipinski, Osinski, Kowalski, and others, transplanted the French masterpieces to the Polish stage, or imitated them.  The actors, Boguslawski, Bielawski, and Zolkowski, wrote original pieces.  Tragedies, mostly on subjects of Polish history, were written by Niemcewicz, Felinski, Dembowski, Slowacki, Kropinski.  Hofmann, and F. Wenzyk, whose “Glinski” is considered as the best Polish production of this kind.  The most popular comedies in recent times are by count Fredro, who is called the Polish Moliere.  The Polish stage is still richer in melo-dramas, especially rural pictures in a dramatic form; of which Niemcewicz’s piece, “John Kochanowski,” is a fine specimen.

As it respects novels, tales in prose, and similar productions, the literature of Poland has been much less overwhelmed with this species of writing, in which mediocrity is so easy and perfection so rare, than that of their neighbours the Russians.  We think this can easily be accounted for.  They possess few, for the same reason that the English are so rich in them.  Domestic life, the true basis of the modern novel, has no charms in Poland.  The whole tendency of the nation is towards public life, splendour, military fame; theirs are not the modest virtues of private retirement, but the heroic deeds of public renown.  The beauty, the spirit, the influence of their women, is generally acknowledged; but that female reserve and delicacy which draws the thread of an English novel through three volumes, would be looked for in vain in Poland.  Niemcewicz, however, published in 1827 an historical novel, “John of Trenczyn,” which is considered as a happy imitation of Scott.  Others were written by count Skarbeck.  Among the novels, which present a psychological development of character, and a description of fashionable life, “The Intimations of the Heart” is regarded as the principal work.  It was written by the princess of Wirtemberg, daughter of Adam and Isabella Czartoryski.  Another esteemed female writer is Clementina Hofmann, formerly Tanska.

The Poles, although from a feeling of pride and patriotism naturally disposed to overrate the productions of their own literature, are far from being deficient in critical judgment or in exalted ideas on the theory of the beautiful.  The count Stanislaus Potocki and Ossolinski, L. Osinski, Golanski, and others, maintain a high rank in this department.