y
later.[13] But by introducing a better order of things, by providing
his subjects with their earliest code of laws, by instituting the
first constitutional diets, by fortifying the cities and protecting
the tillers of the soil against a wild and oppressive nobility, he
established a better tone of moral feeling throughout the nation. A
seed, sown in such ground, necessarily springs up slowly, but surely.

With Casimir the race of the Pjasts expired. His nephew, Louis of
Hungary, a prince of the house of Anjou, was elected king; but his
reign was spent in constant war, and left no trace of care for the
internal cultivation of the country. The limitation of the power of
the sovereign, and the exorbitant privileges of the Polish nobility,
date from the reign of this prince; he resided mostly in Hungary, and
granted to the Poles all their demands, in order to prevent the
alienation of their crown from his house. After his death his second
daughter, Hedevig, was preferred to the emperor Sigismund, who was
married to the eldest, Mary; because this prince refused to subscribe
the conditions demanded by the Polish Estates. Hedevig married Jagello
of Lithuania; and under their descendants the Jagellons, who reigned
nearly two centuries, Poland rose to the summit of its power and
glory. With Siegmund I, the grandson of Jagello, but the fifth king
after him, a new period of the Polish literature begins.

The history of the Polish language, as we have already said, properly
commences only with the close, or at the utmost with the middle of the
present period, when in the year 1488 the first printing office was
erected at Cracow. Of the more ancient times, with a few exceptions,
only weak and scattered traces are left. There was said to have
existed a Polish translation of the Bible, made by order of queen
Hedevig before the year 1390; but no copy had ever been seen; and
there was reason to doubt whether it ever existed. There was extant
however, an old manuscript of a Psalter, which the antiquarian Thadd.
Czacki took to be a fragment of it; and other ancient manuscripts of
portions of a Psalter were found at Saros Patak in Hungary, and seemed
to belong to it. But no one of these codices bore any incontestable
mark of its age. The Psalter of St. Florian, a convent near Linz in
Austria, discovered in 1826 by the librarian Chmel, proved at last to
be in reality the lost treasure. This important document, the origin
of which could