years 1638 and 1658 the utmost rigour of
oppression, and were finally banished from the country; and all this
without having done any thing to forfeit their rights as dissidents,
from which body they had to be formally expelled by the united hatred
of the other Protestants and Catholics, before even a pretext could be
devised of proceeding lawfully against them. Nor had the Lutherans,
Calvinists, Greeks, and Armenians, who, after the exclusion of the
Unitarians, Quakers, and Anabaptists, were alone comprised under the
name of dissidents, given any occasion for that gradual deprivation
which they had to encounter of their lawful rights, in the possession
of which they had been a hundred and fifty years undisturbed. The
storm which threatened them, first manifested itself publicly in the
diets of 1717 and 1718, and degenerated at last into open and
shameless persecution. In the year 1724, a quarrel arose at Thorn, on
occasion of a procession of the Jesuits, between the students of one
of their schools and those of the Lutheran gymnasium. A Lutheran mob
intermeddled and committed some excesses; in consequence of which the
Jesuit Wolanski, in the name of his order, instituted a lawsuit
against the Lutheran magistracy of the city. The result of this
lawsuit was a tragedy, such as only the bloody pages of the books of
the inquisition can exhibit, and unequalled as to its motives in the
annals of the eighteenth century. All the perpetrators were punished
with the utmost rigour; while Roesner, the president of the city,
together with eleven other citizens, was publicly beheaded, and their
property confiscated for the benefit of the order.

A body which acted in such a spirit, placed at the head of public
education, could exert but a very injurious influence in a moral and
religious respect; its influence on the literature and language has
been described above. The general mental paralysis and lethargy, which
reigned in Poland during this period, can indeed hardly be ascribed
solely to their influence; but the latter served greatly to increase
it. For more than twenty years _all_ the schools in the whole country
were in the hands of the Jesuits; and when in the year 1642 the
congregation of the Piarists erected their first school in Warsaw,
which soon was followed by several others founded by the same order,
these seminaries had to struggle for nearly a century, watched and
oppressed by the jealousy and despotism of the Jesuits,