printed some books in their castles; but his patrons and protectors tore him from his beloved work, and forced him to cultivate the land. He wrote of himself : — "It was not my work to sow the grain, but to scatter through the earth food for the mind, nourishment for the souls of all mankind." He fled to Lemberg, where he died in extreme poverty, leaving his precious treasure to a Jew.
The seventeenth century produced a few specimens of secular literature. But it was an unfavorable time, a time of anxiety, of usurpations; and afterwards came the Polish invasion. When intellectual life again awoke, theological works were the order of the day; and even up to the time of Peter the Great, all the writers of note were theologians.
The development of general literature in Russia was precisely analogous to that of Western Europe, only about two centuries later, the seventeenth century in Russia corresponding to the fifteenth in France. With popular literature, or folk-lore, however, the case is quite otherwise; nowhere is it so rich and varied as with the Slavonians.
Nature and history seem to have been too cruel to this people. Their spirits rise in rebellion against their condition, and soar into that
fantastic realm of the imagination, above and outside the material world; a realm created by the
