William Coxe, the English historian and writer of travels, who visited Poland after the first partition, relates, in speaking of the district called Podlachia, that he visited between Bjelsk and Woyszki villages in which there was nothing but the bare walls, and he was told at the table of the ------ that knives, forks, and spoons were conveniences unknown to the peasants.

He says he never saw-- a road so barren of interesting scenes as that from Cracow to Warsaw--for the most part level, with little variation of surface; chiefly overspread with tracts of thick forest; where open, the distant horizon was always skirted with wood (chiefly pines and firs, intermixed with beech, birch, and small oaks).

The occasional breaks presented some pasture- ground, with here and there a few meagre crops of corn.

The natives were poorer, humbler, and more miserable than any people we had yet observed in the course of our travels: whenever we stopped they flocked around us in crowds; and, asking for charity, used the most abject gestures....The Polish peasants are cringing and servile in their expressions of respect; they bowed down to the ground; took off their hats or caps and held them in their hands till we were out of sight; stopped their carts on the first glimpse of our carriage; in short, their whole behaviour gave evident symptoms of the abject servitude under which they groaned.
[FOOTNOTE: William Coxe, Travels in Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1784--90).] The Jews, to whom I have already more than once alluded, are too important an element in the population of Poland not to be particularly noticed.

They are a people within a people, differing in dress as well as in language, which is a jargon of German-Hebrew.