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, before they could acquire any influence consistent with the spirit in which they were founded. To the talents and firmness of Stanislaus Konarski, himself a Piarist, the Polish literary historians ascribe the principal merits of the final victory of his order. His endeavours indeed were favoured by a combination of fortunate circumstances. Literature and the fine arts found a friend and protector in a gifted and accomplished king, and in several high-minded noblemen of even more than regal authority. But the period of pedantry, perversion of taste, and deficiency of true criticism, had already lasted more than a hundred and thirty years. There was much to be done to cleanse the beds in the garden of literature from all the weeds which had luxuriated there, and to fertilize a soil which had so long lain fallow. The details of these endeavours belong however to the following period.