in true epic power and original
invention. His smaller poems and prose writings are replete with wit
and spirit; to see a bishop writing erotic songs and satirical
epigrams was nothing extraordinary in his time. As a prose writer be
appears as one of the few who were not blind to the defects and
follies of their countrymen. Of his translations we mention
Macpherson's Ossian and Plutarch. He belongs so decidedly to his age,
i.e. to the age of the freezing, unpoetical, French influence, that
our time, with its higher standard for a true poet, can no longer set
a great value on his works.[57]

Trembecki, ob. 1812, as a lyric poet takes equal rank, according to
some Polish critics, with Krasicki. His chief poem, _Zofiowka_, which
has been translated into French by La Garde, is of that descriptive,
contemplative kind, which was fashionable in his day. He had more
imagination than other cotemporary Polish poets. Szymanowski, ob.
1801, a writer of pastorals, is distinguished for delicacy and
sweetness. As to the beauty of his diction his countrymen are the best
judges; but as for the character and real poetical value of his
productions, we doubt whether the sounder taste of our day would
relish the whole species so highly as was done at a time, when the
forms of society had reached the very summit of artificial perversion.
A certain longing after nature and its purity was the necessary result
of such a state of things; but even nature itself they were unable to
see, except in an artificial light. All the Polish productions of this
species, in the present period, savour strongly of the French school;
whilst the pastorals of the sixteenth century hover in the midst
between the bucolics of the ancients and the Italian and Spanish
eclogues.

There was the same decided influence of the French literature on
Wengierski, who died in 1787; although less in respect to taste than
to morals. Karpinski, also a writer of pastorals, approaches nearest
the Greeks, and is on the whole a poet of uncommon talent. His
original writings bear much more of a national stamp than those of
other poets of this period. His translation of Racine's Athalia is
considered as a masterpiece, and his version of the Psalms has not
been surpassed in any language. Another distinguished poet is
Dionysius Kniaznin, remarkable for a certain external freshness, which
imparts life to all his productions. He was educated in the college of
the Jesuits at Witebsk; and