Polish Romanticism, apart from its typical qualities of that era, also had certain unique features. They were mainly due to specific political circumstances of a nation deprived of its own state. The object of the worship of the past was often not the ancient past, but the immediate one—the times of the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Such literature evoked images of native traditions. In a foreign setting, characteristic elements of Polish culture were pointed out, including the then lost native law and distinct legal culture. They constituted an opposition not only to the law of the countries in which Poles lived at the time, but also to contemporary, nineteenth-century law in general. Legal themes were particularly present in the gawęda szlachecka (a nobleman’s tale), the original literary genre of Polish Romanticism. The old law and its knowledge were promoted as part of the national identity.