and in the 16th, but did not find its way
into Russia till the 17th century. It is probable that the species was,
like so many other elements of culture, imported into the Carpathian
lands in the 15th or 16th century from Germany. How far indigenous
growths, such as the Russian popular puppet-show called _vertep_, which
about the middle of the 17th century began to treat secular and popular
themes, helped to foster dramatic tendencies and tastes, cannot here be
estimated. The regular drama of eastern Europe is to all intents and
purposes of Western origin. Thus, the history of the Polish drama may be
fairly dated as beginning with the reign of the last king of Poland,
Stanislaus II. Augustus, who in 1765 solemnly opened a national theatre
at Warsaw. This institution was carried on till the fatal year 1794, and
saw the production of a considerable number of Polish plays, mostly
translated or adapted, but in part original--as in the case of one or
two of those from the active pen of the secretary to the educational
commission, Zablonski. But it was not till after the last partition
that, paradoxically though not wholly out of accordance with the history
of the relations between political and literary history, the attempts of
W. Bogulawski and J. N. Kaminski to establish and carry on a Polish
national theatre were crowned with success. Its literary mainstay was a
gifted Franco-Pole, Count Alexander Fredro (1793-1876), who in the
period between the Napoleonic revival and the long exodus fathered a
long-lived species of modern Polish comedy, French in origin (for Fredro
was a true disciple of Moliere), and wholly out of contact with the
sentiment that survived in the ashes of a doomed nation.[324] His
complaint as to the exiguity of the Polish literary public--a brace of
theatres and a bookseller's handcart--may have been premature; but a
national drama was most certainly impossible in a denationalised and
dismembered land, in whose historic capital the theatre in which Polish
plays continued to be produced seemed garrisoned by Cossack officers.

Russian.

Much in the same way, though with a characteristic difference, the
Russian regular drama had its origin in the cadet corps at St
Petersburg, a pupil of which, A. Sumarokov (1718-1777), has been
regarded as the founder of the modern Russian theatre. As a tragic poet
he seems to have imitated Racine and Voltaire, though treating themes
from the national history, among o