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.