SARBIEWSKI, MATTHIAS KASIMIERZ. — Jesuit and humanist, known as “the Polish Horace,” born at Sarbiawo, the family castle near Plonsk, on 24 February 1595, died at Warsaw on 2 April 1640.
He entered the Order in 1612 and was in Rome from 1622 to 1625, summoned there by Urban VIII for the reform of the hymns of the Breviary; but he had no major part in this (the following are attributed to him: Superne regum rex bone and Rex magne, rex altissime, as well as the corrections to Ad regias Agni dapes); thereafter he taught rhetoric, philosophy, and theology at Polozk and Wilno; in 1635 he became preacher and confessor to King Ladislaus IV.
Besides sermons in Latin and Polish, he left a great reputation as a lyric poet with a series of Latin poems in the style and form of Horace, in which he celebrates patriotic or religious events: Lyricorum libri tres (Cologne 1625), which in subsequent editions became four, with the addition of Epigrammatum liber unus and Epodon liber unus. Unfinished and unpublished remained the epic poem (10 cantos) modeled on Virgil’s Aeneid: Lachiades, in which he celebrates the founder of the Kingdom of Poland. So classical and refined does he prove himself in his fluent poetic vein that the book of his odes was used for a long time as a school textbook in place of Horace.
IBBL.: complete and critical ed.: Poëmata omnia, edited by J. Wall, Starawies 1892, which also contains the poem Silviudia. Studies: Sommervogel, VII, cols. 627–46; J. B. Diel, M. K. S., der Vorgänger Balde's, in Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, 4 (1873), pp. 159–73, 343–57; 5 (1874), pp. 63–76, 365–77; A. Baumgartner, Gesch. der Weltliteratur, IV, Freiburg in Br. 1900, pp. 642–56; T. M. Müller, De M. C. S. polonus S. I. Horatii imitatore, Munich 1917; J. Oko, M. K. S. poeta uwiehczony, Wilno 1923; J. Swierzowicz, M. K. S. Próba wizerunku psychologicznego, there 1932. Celestino Testore