further, I must yet make mention of Anton Barcinski, professor at the Polytechnic School, teacher at Nicholas Chopin’s institution, and by-and-by his son-in-law; Dr. Jarocki, the zoologist; Julius Kolberg, the engineer; and Brodowski, the painter.  These and others, although to us only names, or little more, are nevertheless not without their significance.  We may liken them to the supernumeraries on the stage, who, dumb as they are, help to set off and show the position of the principal figure or figures.

The love of literature which we have noticed in the young Chopins, more particularly in the sisters, implanted by an excellent education and fostered by the taste, habits, and encouragement of their father, cannot but have been greatly influenced and strengthened by the characters and conversation of such visitors.  Arid let it not be overlooked that this was the time of Poland’s intellectual renascence—­a time when the influence of man over man is greater than at other times, he being, as it were, charged with a kind of vivifying electricity.  The misfortunes that had passed over Poland had purified and fortified the nation—­breathed into it a new and healthier life.  The change which the country underwent from the middle of the eighteenth to the earlier part of the nineteenth century was indeed immense.  Then Poland, to use Carlyle’s drastic phraseology, had ripened into a condition of “beautifully phosphorescent rot-heap”; now, with an improved agriculture, reviving commerce, and rising industry, it was more prosperous than it had been for centuries.  As regards intellectual matters, the comparison with the past was even more favourable to the present.  The government that took the helm in 1815 followed the direction taken by its predecessors, and schools and universities flourished; but a most hopeful sign was this, that whilst the epoch of Stanislas Augustus was, as Mickiewicz remarked (in Les Slaves), little Slavonic and not even national, now the national spirit pervaded the whole intellectual atmosphere, and incited workers in all branches of science and art to unprecedented efforts.  To confine ourselves to one department, we find that the study of the history and literature of Poland had received a vigorous impulse, folk-songs were zealously collected, and a new school of poetry, romanticism, rose victoriously over the fading splendour of an effete classicism.  The literature of the time of Stanislas was a court and salon literature, and under the influence of France and ancient Rome.  The literature that began to bud about 1815, and whose germs are to be sought for in the preceding revolutionary time, was more of a people’s literature, and under the influence of Germany, England, and Russia.  The one was a hot-house plant, the other a garden flower, or even a wild flower.  The classics swore by the precepts of Horace and Boileau, and held that among the works of Shakespeare there was not one veritable tragedy.  The romanticists, on the other hand,