posed towards the language, it cannot be said that the influence of
the foreign clergy was in other respects injurious to the literary
cultivation of the country. Benedictine monks founded in the beginning
of the eleventh century the first Polish schools; and numerous
convents of their own and other orders presented to the scholar an
asylum, both when in the year 1241 the Mongols broke into the country,
and also during the civil wars which were caused by the family
dissensions of Pjast's successors. Several chronicles in Latin were
written by Poles long before the history of the Polish literature
begins; and Polish noblemen went to Paris, Bologna, and Prague, to
study sciences, for the very elements of which their own language
afforded them no means.

Polish writers are in the habit of dividing the history of their
language into five periods.[4]

The _first_ period extends from the introduction of Christianity to
Cassimir the Great, A.D. 1333.

The _second_ period extends from A.D. 1333 to A.D. 1506, or the reign
of Sigismund I.

The _third_ period is the golden age of the Polish literature, and
closes with the foundation of the schools of the Jesuits, A.D. 1622.

The _fourth_ period comprises the time of the preponderance of the
Jesuits, and ends with the revival of literature by Konarski, A.D.
1760.

The _fifth_ period comprehends the interval from A.D. 1760 to the
revolution in 1830.

As the Polish literature of our own day bears a different stamp from
that of former times, we may add a _sixth_ period, extending from 1830
to the present time.

Before we enter upon a regular historical account of these different
periods, we will devote a few words to the history and character of
the language itself.

The extent of country, in which the Polish language is predominant, is
much smaller than would naturally be concluded from the great
circuit of territory, which, at the time of its power and
independence, was comprised under the kingdom of Poland. We do not
allude to the sixteenth century, when Poland by the success of its
arms became for a short time the most powerful state in the north;
when the Teutonic knights, the conquerors of Prussia, were compelled
to acknowledge its protection; and when not only were Livonia and
Courland, the one a component part of the Polish kingdom, and the
other a Polish fief, but even the ancient Smolensk and the venerable
Kief, the royal seat of Vladimir, and the Russian provin