The French language indeed, independently of the political events of modern times, had already acted powerfully on the Polish at the close of the preceding period. In poetry, the affected bombastic school of the Gongorists and Marinists had been supplanted throughout all Europe by the better taste of the cold, stiff, and formal French poets, whose defects it was much easier to imitate than their merits. For more than half a century the French language reigned with an uncontrolled and unlimited sovereignty over all the literary world. But its most absolute dominion was in Poland. In the manners of the nobility of this country, French gracefulness and ease were, in a peculiar and interesting manner, blended with the daring heroism of the knight and the luxuriousness of the Asiatic despot. French refinement and French witticism covered the rudeness and revelry characteristic of the middle ages. French teachers and governesses had inundated the whole country, and a journey to France was among the requisite conditions of an accomplished education. The Polish writers--all of them belonging to the nobility--to whom, from their youth, the French language was equally familiar with their own, unconsciously disfigured the latter by Gallicisms; since French forms of expression seemed to be the best adapted for the expression of French thoughts and French philosophy. A modern Polish author calls the Polish literature of this period a second edition of the French with inferior types and on worse paper.[45] Long after the rest of literary Europe had shaken off the yoke, the Polish poets, although the genius of their rich, creative, and pliant language was decidedly opposed to such a slavery, continued to submit to French rules and laws, and do so partly still. We begin the enumeration of the distinguished writers of this period, with its principal founder, Stephen Konarski, mentioned above,[46] who was born A.D. 1700, and died in 1773. In his seventeenth year he entered the order of Piarists, and became later a professor in the college of this congregation at Warsaw. After a long stay in Italy and France, he returned to Poland; accompanied king Stanislaus Leszczynski to Lorrain; but again returned to his country and founded several institutions for education in Warsaw, Wilna, and Lemberg, on principles different from those of the Jesuits. In the year 1747 he went a third time to France, but returned after three years; and from that time devoted himself entirely to the literary and mental reform of his own country. Of his printed works, twenty-eight in number, fourteen are written in Polish. They embrace different topics in poetry, and a tragedy; but his principal merits lie in his writings on the subject of politics and education.[47]