ample was
followed by Latosz, Rosciszewski, Andrew of Kobylin, Umiastowski,
Spiczynski, Siennik, Oczko, Grutinius, Syrenski, in Latin Sirenius,
and others, all physicians, astronomers, botanists, etc.[36]

FOURTH PERIOD.

_From the erection of the Cracovian Jesuit Schools in A.D_. 1622, _to
the revival of science in A.D_. 1760.

The noble race of the Jagellons had become extinct on the death of
Sigismund Augustus, in 1572.[37] Poland had become formally an
elective monarchy. Henry of Valois was the first to subscribe the
_pacta conventa_, the fundamental law of the national liberty; the
nation being understood to consist legally only of the nobility.[38]
Stephen Bathory's strength kept the discordant elements together; and
while at home he took care to improve the administration of justice,
and erected the high tribunals of Petricau, Lublin, and Wilna, his
victorious arms in his contest with Russia raised Poland for a short
time to the summit of its glory. But under his successor Sigismund
III, a Swedish prince, and nephew of Sigismund Augustus and of
Stephen, began that anarchy which is to be considered as the principal
cause of Poland's final calamitous fate. For about fifty years the
Poles still maintained with equal valour, though with alternate good
and ill success, their warlike character abroad; even while internal
dissensions and bloody party strife raged in their own unhappy
country. But to such fundamental evils, combined with the rising power
of Russia, with the revolt of the Kozaks in 1654, occasioned
principally by religious oppression, and with the gradual but sure
advancement of a new rival in the elector of Brandenburg, hitherto
considered as a weak neighbour--to all these influences, the building
thus sapped in its foundation could make no resistance, and its walls
could not but give way, when they were suddenly shaken by the hands of
avaricious and powerful enemies from without.

The perversion of taste, which at the beginning of the seventeenth
century reigned in Italy, and thence spread over all Europe, with much
more rapidity indeed than the true poetry and pure style of the
fifteenth century had done, created also in the literature of Poland a
new period; which, through the political circumstances above referred
to, was protracted to a greater length than would have been expected
in a literature already so rich in national models. To the remarkable
activity of mind in the preceding period,