[Footnote 35: This work was first printed at Cracow in 1597, under the title _Kronika Polska_. The first part of it was republished at Warsaw in 1832, forming the sixth volume of the great collection of ancient Polish authors published by the bookseller Galezowski.] [Footnote 36: For more complete information respecting the writers of this period, see Bentkowaki's _Hist. lit. Pol_ Vol. I. Schaffarik's _Gechichte_, etc.] [Footnote 37: We mean the direct male descendants of Jagello; for descendants by the female and collateral lines occupied the throne after Stephen Bathory. Poland had never been by law an hereditary kingdom; but in most cases one of the sons or brothers of the last king was elected.] [Footnote 38: These _pacta conventa_, to which numerous articles were afterwards added, not only limiled the king in his quality as king, but even also as a private man, in a degree to which no freeman would willingly submit. For example, he was not allowed to marry except with the consent of the diet; and as each single nuntius had the right to oppose and render void the resolutions of the united estates by his _liberum veto_, the king could not marry whenever it occurred to any one of them to withhold his consent. In 1669 it was resolved, that no king should be allowed to abdicate.] [Footnote 39: _Korona Polska_, Lemberg 1728-1743.] [Footnote 40: In 1764; it was the first periodical ever published in Poland.] [Footnote 41: See page 227 above.] [Footnote 42: The Polish serfs were indeed never regular slaves; but merely _glebae adscripti_, i.e. they could not be sold separately as mere things, but only with the soil they cultivated, which they had no right to leave. They were not reduced even to this state before the fifteenth or sixteenth century; for one of the statutes of Casimir the Great allows them the privilege of selling their property and leaving whenever they were ill treated. Of the present state of the Polish peasantry, the author of "Poland under the dominion of Russia," (Bost. 1834,) says: "The Polish peasant might perhaps be about as free as my dog was in Warsaw; for I certainly should not have prevented the animal from learning, had he been so inclined, some tricks by which he could earn the reward of an extra bone. The freedom of the wretched Polish serfs is much the same as the freedom of their cattle; for they are brought up with as little of human cultivation," etc. p. 165. And again: "The Polish serf is in every part of the country extremely poor, and of all the living creatures I have met with in this world, or seen described in books of natural history, he is the most wretched." p. 176.]