629 



SIXTUS V. 



SKARGA POWESKI, PIOTB, OR PKTER. 



530 



together a general council of the church, upon which Sixtus thought 

 it advisable to detach himself from the Venetians, and make a separate 

 peace with the duke of Ferrara. Ho then advised the Venetians to do 

 the same, and as they disregarded his counsel, ho solemnly excommu- 

 nicated his late allies. In 1484 however the Venetians made peace 

 also, and a few days after Sixtus died. He was one of the most tur- 

 bulent and unscrupulous in the long list of pontiffs. 



SIXTUS V. (Cardinal Felice Peretti of Montalto) succeeded 

 Gregory XIII. in 1585. His first care was to purge the city and 

 neighbourhood of Rome of the numerous outlaws which the eupine- 

 ness of his predecessors had encouraged. He resorted to summary 

 means, he employed spies and armed men, and he soon extirpated by 

 the sword and the halter the noxious brood. The name of 'Papa 

 Sisto,' as connected with his summary justice, has continued pro- 

 verbial at Rome to the present day. Being a shrewd politician, he 

 disliked the overgrown power of Spain, and was not displeased at the 

 staunch opposition which Philip II. received from Elizabeth of 

 England, whom Sixtus however formally excommunicated as a heretic. 

 He embellished Rome with numerous and useful structures, among 

 others the present building of the Vatican library (Bocca, 'De Sixti 

 V. Edificiis,' in his ' Bibliotheca Vaticana.') He published a new edition 

 of the Septuagiut, 1587, and one of the Vulgate with improvements, 

 1 590 ; and he himself edited the works of St. Ambrose, and is said also 

 to have superintended an Italian translation of the Bible, which was 

 condemned by the Spanish Inquisition, between which body and 

 Sixtus there was little sympathy. Sixtus died in August 1589. His 

 life has been written by Leti, Tempesti, Robardi, and others. As a 

 temporal prince he was distinguished in his age. 



SJOBEltG, ERIK, a Swedish lyric poet of considerable note, is 

 better known under the assumed name of Vitalis, which was the 

 signature to his earliest poems, and which he intended to convey the 

 notion of ' Vita-lis,' ' Life is a struggle.' In his own case the motto 

 was but too well borne out. He was born on the 14th of January 

 1794, in the parish of Ludgo in Sb'deruaanland or Sudermania, and his 

 parents were unequally matched, his father being a common labouring 

 man, and his mother the daughter of a clergyman. The child was of a 

 weakly constitution. It soon became evident that he would not be 

 fitted for hard work, and as he grew up he manifested a love for 

 books and learning. His father thwarted his inclinations, but fortu- 

 nately for the boy, the schoolmaster of Trosa took an interest in 

 him, and in 1806, when he was removed from his school wrote to 

 some relations of Erik's mother, that the boy was of uncommon 

 capacity, and ought to be encouraged. A small subscription was 

 raised, and Erik was sent to the gymnasium or grammar-school of 

 Strengniis. A friendship was soon struck up between him and one of 

 the other boys named Nicander, which with some interruptions lasted 

 through life, and their names are still constantly associated in the 

 history of Swedish literature. They were students at Upsal together 

 in 1819, Sjb'berg having gone to the university in 1814, when Bruzelius 

 a bookseller projected a new ' Ladies' Calendar,' or as it would be 

 called in England an annual, to compete with that of Atterbom, pub- 

 lished by Palmblad [PALMBLAD], which had met with distinguished 

 success. Nicander wrote in the new annual under the signature of 

 August, and Sjoberg under that of Vitalis ; and its appearance pro- 

 duced a sensation. From that time they were both poets of note, but 

 their success brought them little pecuniary advantage. Sjoberg was 

 in the habit of walking the streets of Upsal in the coldest weather 

 without a greatcoat, and Palmblad tells us that the practice which 

 was attributed by the ladies to a poetical whim, was owing to sheer 

 poverty, and to a sensitive pride which rendered it impossible for a 

 friend to offer assistance without the certainty of having it resented as 

 an affront. In 1822, however, the Crown Priuce of Sweden, the present 

 King Oscar, on a visit to the university of Upsal, had his attention 

 called by Professor Geijer [GEIJER], to the circumstances of Vitalis, 

 and offered him a pension of 200 rix-dollars for his support at the uni- 

 versity till he should have taken his degree in philosophy. The poet 

 was prevailed upon to accept it as coming from a public source ; but in 

 the following year, from some scruples which were in his mind concern- 

 ing it, he threw it up, though as deeply steeped in poverty as ever. 

 In 1824 he left the university, and afterwards settled at Stockholm in 

 the dreadful position of a Swedish author seeking to earn his livelihood 

 by his talents. After issuing a;few poems and some translations from 

 Washington Irving, and suffering all the evils of extreme poverty, he 

 was attacked by consumption, which had long threatened him, and on 

 the 4th of March 1828, he died in an hospital. 



His poems were collected and published in 1828, after his death, by 

 Geijer, with a prefatory memoir, from which and from a memoir by 

 Palmblad, in his ' Biographical Dictionary of eminent Swedes,' the 

 foregoing facts have principally been taken. Palmblad observes that 

 all that Vitalis wrote was either .above or below mediocrity. His 

 happiest efforts were in comic verse, and he was remarkable for the 

 freedom of sarcasm in which he indulged with regard to his friends, 

 while with regard to himself he was always sensitive in the extreme. 

 Some of his satire was directed against Nic.inder, and led to a temporary 

 estrangement, and some against Palmblad, who had not forgotten it 

 and does not appear to have forgiven it when he wrote his biography. 



* SJO'GREN, ANDREAS JOHANN, an eminent philologist, whose 

 labours have chiefly been devoted to the elucidation of the Finnish 



BIOG. DIV. VOL. V. 



family of languages, is by birth a Finn, but first had his attention 

 called to that particular study by Rask the Dane [RASK], Sjogren 

 was born in the parish of Ithis, in Finland, on the 8th of May, 1794, 

 studied first at Lowisa and Borgo, and then at the university of Abo, 

 and in 1819 went to reside at St. Petersburg as a private tutor. His 

 first work ' On the Finnish Language and Literature,' written in 

 German, appeared at St. Petersburg in 1821 ; two years afterwards he 

 became librarian of the Romanzov or Rumiantsov public library ; and 

 in 1824, he undertook a journey of scientific and literary investigation 

 to Finland, the fruits of which appeared in his ' Notes on the Parishes 

 in Kemi-Lappmark ' (Helsingfora, 1828), written in Swedish. A 

 disorder in one of his eyes, for which he was advised to visit the 

 mineral springs of the Caucasus, took him to the south, and during his 

 absence, which lasted from 1835 to 1838, he is said to have mastered 

 the Tatar, the Turkish, the Persian, the Armenian, the Georgian, the 

 Circassian, and the Ossetic languages. His 'Ossetic Grammar and 

 Vocabulary,' in German, occupying a quarto volume, published in 

 1844, is considered a model of works of the kind. The whole struc- 

 ture of a language which had but five printed books in its literature, 

 is traced with a minute care and accuracy which seem to leave 

 nothing for a subsequent observer. The alphabet used in these five 

 books is, it may be remarked, discarded by Sjogren, who has invented 

 a new alphabet for the Ossetic, consisting of the Russian alphabet, 

 with some additional characters to express familiar sounds. On the 

 publication of this important work, its author, who was already an 

 "adjunct" in the St. Petersburg Academy, was appointed special 

 member for the philology and ethnography of the Finnish and 

 Caucasian nations, and a month after director of the Academical 

 Ethnographical Museum. He has since been a frequent contributor 

 to the ' Bulletin ' and ' Memoires ' of the Academy, in which he has 

 made public some interesting researches in the language of Livonia, 

 the product of his journeys to that country in 1846 and 1852. 



*SKARBEK, FREDRIK FLORIAN, COUNT, an eminent Polish 

 writer of fiction and political economy, was born on the 15th of 

 February, 1792, at Thorn, studied from 1805 to 1810 at Warsaw, and 

 completed his studies at Paris. In 1818, at the age of twenty-six, he 

 was appointed Professor of Political Economy at the University of 

 Warsaw, and soon afterwards published works in Polish on ' Political 

 Economy' (4 vola, 1820-21); ' The Theory of Finance' (1824); and 

 the 'Elements of National Economy." In 1829 he composed a work 

 on the same science in French, the ' Theory of Social Wealth,' 

 (' The'orie des llichesses Sociales' 2 vob, Paris, 1829). His reputation 

 among the general Polish public was however chiefly acquired by hia 

 ' Tales and Humorous Writings ' (' Powiesci i Pisma Humorystyczne '), 

 of which a collection in 6 vols. was published at Breslau in 1840. In 

 the dedication of one of them, ' Tarlo,' addressed to his friend Lukas 

 Golebiowski the historian, he says, that having rigidly allotted its 

 occupation to every hour of the day, and finding that he was often 

 unable to spend those hours intended for ' recreation ' in the society of 

 his friends, he resolved on employing them in novel writing, and that 

 these volumes were the result. The tales are lively and interesting in 

 spite of the sober and mechanical character of their origin ; and it 

 must be remembered that the best English novels of our time have 

 been produced with a degree of mechanical regularity that till it was 

 achieved would have seemed impossible ; that they have been settled 

 beforehand to extend to a certain number of pages with a certain 

 number of lines in each page, and with a definite break at certain 

 intervals, and that these irksome conditions have been fulfilled over and 

 over again without any sign of effort. ' The Journey without an Object, 

 ' The Small Pleasures of Life,' and ' The Adventures of Dodosynski,' 

 are three of Skarbek's most interesting tales ; and he has also gained 

 some reputation as a dramatic poet. Before the Polish insurrection of 

 1830, be had distinguished himself by his labours with regard to 

 pauperism and the improvement of prison discipline ; and since the 

 re-establishment of Russian domination in Poland, he has, holding 

 high office in the government, entirely remodelled the system, of the 

 houses of detention of Warsaw, Kalish, Plock, and Siedletz, the 

 prisons at Warsaw and Sieradz, the houses of refuge and workhouses 

 in Warsaw and elsewhere, and the institution for the reform of juvenile 

 criminals. In 1842 he was appointed President of the Insurance 

 Societies of Poland, and in 1844 President of the Benevolent Insti- 

 tutions. 



SKARGA POWESKI, PIOTR, or PETER, the most eminent 

 preacher whom Poland has ever produced, still retains, after the lapse 

 of a quarter of a thousand years, the title which was given him by his 

 contemporaries, of the Polish Chrysostom. Born in 1536 at Grodziec, 

 a town of Masovia, he took holy orders in 1563, and went to Rome in 

 1568, to enter the then newly established order of Jesuits. It was after 

 this that he became eminent for pulpit oratory, and the return of Poland 

 to Catholicism is attributed in a great degree by the Roman Catholics 

 to the extraordinary eloquence of Skarga, For twenty-five years he 

 was court preacher to King Sigismund III., to whose violent measures 

 against them the Protestants are more disposed to attribute the 

 decline of Protestantism in Poland. It was in 1612, the culminating 

 point of the reign of Sigismuud, when the Poles were in possession of 

 Moscow, that Skarga, who had previously retired from public life, 

 expired in a cell of the house of the Jesuits at Cracow. The Jesuits 

 in general are notorious in the history of Polish literature for the 



