Joachim Lelewel, whose literary activity belongs rather to the preceding period, while that now under consideration was partly the result of his political career, lives still at Brussels, where he has recently published (1849) a work on the civil rights of the Polish peasantry.  He attempts to demonstrate, that the oppression and the debased condition of this class came upon them along with the introduction of Christianity; and represents the Romish clergy, whose advantage it was to keep up this state of things, as the principal enemies of the peasantry.  Lelewel’s writings have wielded a more decided influence in Poland than those of any other modern author.  The tendency of all his historical investigations, even when apparently without any such design, has been since the very beginning of the Russian dominion to undermine their power; and the great ability with which he contrived to veil hints, to disguise remarks, and to follow out under a harmless mask a certain and fixed purpose, had earned him twenty or thirty years ago the name of the “Jesuit of history.”

It remains now to give a general survey of the progress of Polish belles-lettres during the last twenty years; and also of those mixed publications which excite a general interest.  Here we must not omit to mention Witwicki’s the “Evening Hours of a Pilgrim,” [83] a book which, in a sprightly style and a peculiarly interesting way, gives a good deal of information as to the literary and mental condition of Poland, and the much-lauded revival of letters during the reign of Stanislaus Poniatowski.

But perhaps the most interesting production of this period is Adam Mickiewicz’s course of Lectures on Slavic literature and the condition of the Slavic nations, delivered in French at Paris, where he had found employment as a professor in the College de France.[84] The deep enthusiasm which pervades these lectures, the mental excitement by which they would seem to have been dictated from beginning to end, forbid us to consider them in the ordinary light of a mere course of instruction on the subject to which they relate.  But there is no other work more full of ideas, or richer in thought; it is the reasoning of a poet, and a poet’s way of viewing the world.  The one great principle of these lectures again is Panslavism,—­Panslavism spiritualized and idealized; and therefore in a shape which can inspire little fear to others in respect to their own nationality, although it can never excite their sympathies.  Mickiewicz still idolizes Napoleon, and prophesies a revolution of the world; a new revolution, a torch to illumine the world; he himself is “a spark, fallen from that torch;” his mission is to prophesy to the world the coming events “as a living witness of the new revelation,” Although these prophecies are not strictly political, we can see plainly, that in the expectation of the prophet this new revolution will consist in “the union of the force of Slavic genius, with the knowledge of the West” (France); by which of course the intermediate Teutonic principle must be crushed.