Germans and Italians.
Hence arose that unnatural neglect of the vernacular tongue, of which
these were ignorant; the private influence of the German, still
visible in the Polish language; and the unlimited dominion of the
Latin. Slavic, Polish, and heathenish, were to them synonymous words.
Thus, while the light of Christianity everywhere carried the first
dawn of life into the night of Slavic antiquity, the early history of
Poland affords more than any other part of the Christian world a
melancholy proof, how the passions and blindness of men operated to
counterbalance that holy influence. But although so unfavourably
disposed towards the language, it cannot be said that the influence of
the foreign clergy was in other respects injurious to the literary
cultivation of the country. Benedictine monks founded in the beginning
of the eleventh century the first Polish schools; and numerous
convents of their own and other orders presented to the scholar an
asylum, both when in the year 1241 the Mongols broke into the country,
and also during the civil wars which were caused by the family
dissensions of Pjast's successors. Several chronicles in Latin were
written by Poles long before the history of the Polish literature
begins; and Polish noblemen went to Paris, Bologna, and Prague, to
study sciences, for the very elements of which their own language
afforded them no means.
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