The Poles, although from a feeling of pride and patriotism naturally disposed to overrate the productions of their own literature, are far from being deficient in critical judgment or in exalted ideas on the theory of the beautiful. The count Stanislaus Potocki and Ossolinski, L. Osinski, Golanski, and others, maintain a high rank in this department. Philosophy, as an abstract science, independently of its immediate application to subjects of real life, has never found more than a few votaries among the Poles. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, Aristotle was translated into Polish by Petryci. For nearly two hundred years, the teachers of philosophy in the Polish universities stopped at Aristotle; and a few commentaries on his Ethics and Politics composed the whole philosophical literature of Poland. In the first years of our own century, Jaronski and Szianiawski made an attempt to introduce the philosophy of Kant; but although the cause appeared to be in the best hands, they met with little success. Galuchowski, a German philosophical writer of merit, is a Pole by birth;[60] as also Trentovski and Cieszkowski, followers of Hegel, who prefer the German for their organ.[61] For the study of polite literature and the Slavic languages during this period, Warsaw was the principal seat; for philology and the exact sciences, the university of Wilna. This learned institution had taken special pains in respect to the necessary elementary books for the study of the classical languages; and was distinguished by its able professors Groddek, Bobrowski, and Zukowski. The former, a scholar of high reputation, in addition to several philological works, translated Buttman's Greek Grammar into Polish; the latter published also a Greek and a Hebrew Grammar. In the oriental languages Senkowski at St. Petersburgh is distinguished; and count Rzewuski at Vienna had great desert in connection with the periodical work, _Fundgruben des Orients_.