ne only two months. But Stephen Bathory, prince of Transylvania,
the brother-in-law of Sigismund Augustus, who was elected after Henry
of Valois had deserted the country, was as a foreigner in the habit of
interspersing his conversation and writings with Latin words, when the
proper Polish words, of which language he had only an imperfect
knowledge, did not occur to him. It is hardly credible that such a
habit, or rather the imitation of it among his courtiers, could have
had any influence on a language already so well established and
cultivated, as the Polish idiom was at the close of the sixteenth
century. The Polish literary historians, however, ascribe to Bathory's
influence the fashion, which began at this time to prevail, of
debasing the purity of the Polish language by an intermixture of Latin
words and phrases.[23]

Although the Polish literature acquired during this period a kind of
universality, and there were few departments of science, familiar to
that age, which were not to some extent cultivated in it, yet it owes
its principal lustre to the contributions made in it to history,
poetry and rhetoric. The didactic style did not reach the perfection
of the historical; nor did Polish literature acquire any wide domain
in purely scientific productions. In accordance with the national
tendency, the mass of distinguished talents was devoted to those
interests, which yield an immediate profit in life, or which are
themselves rather the results of empirical knowledge, than of abstract
contemplation, viz. to politics, to eloquence, and to poetry, in so
far as this latter is considered not as a creative power, but as the
most appropriate means for expressing and describing the emotions,
passions, and actions of man. There have however always been not a few
gifted Poles, who have cultivated the field of science for its own
sake, without reference to the practical importance of their labours;
and there are more especially at the present time many distinguished
names among the Polish mathematicians, natural philosophers, and
chemists. In Copernicus himself, born indeed of parents of German
extraction, and in a city (Thorn) mostly inhabited by German
colonists, but also born a Polish subject and educated in a Polish
university, Poland and Germany seem to have equal rights.[24]

The principal reason why didactic prose did not acquire the same
degree of cultivation as the historical style, is, that all
scientific works du