.') He, a brother in spirit, fully appreciated the
character of Thaddeus Kosciusko, and the writer of this devoted
tribute feels that she deepens the tints of honor on each name by
thus associating them together. But may the tomb of the British hero
be long in finding its place! That of the Polish patriot has already
received its sacred deposit, and with the sincere oblation of a not
quite stranger's heart, this poor offering is laid on the grave of
him who fought for 'his country's freedom, laws, and native king;'
who, when riches and a crown were proffered to himself by the then
dictator of almost all Europe, declined both, because no price could
buy the independence of an honest man.

"Such was General Kosciusko; such was the model of disinterestedness,
of tempered valor, and of public virtue which his annalist sought to
set forth in the foregoing pages; such was the man who honored their
narrator with his approval and esteem! and in that last word she
feels a privilege, but with due humility, to thus link some little
memorial of herself to after times, by so uniting to the name of
Thaddeus Kosciusko that of his humble but sincere aspirer to such
themes,

       "JANE PORTER.

 "LONG-DITTON ON-THAMES, September, 1819."

Since the above inscription was first written and inscribed in the
former edition, the brave and benign "Christian knight," the Coeur-
de-Lion of our own times, has also been gathered to the tears of his
country, and his monumental statue, as if standing on the victorious
mount of St. Jean d'Acre, is now preparing to be set up, with its
appropriate sacred trophies, in the great Naval Hall at Greenwich. It
is understood that his mortal remains will be removed from the Pere
la Chaise in Paris, where they now lie, to finally rest in St. Paul's
Cathedral, where Nelson sleeps. Kosciusko's tomb is at Cracow, the
ancient capital of Poland; and in the manner of its most ancient
style of sepulchre, it appears an immense earthen tumulus, piled over
the simple-mounded grave, which accumulating portions were severally
borne to their hallowed place in the arms alone of each silent
mourner, in a certain number of successive days, till the whole was
raised into a grand pyramidal mass.

In looking back through the avenue of life to those periods the tale
tells of, what events have occurred, public and private, to the
countries and the individuals referred to in these memoranda! to
persons of lofty names and excellence, both in our own and in other
lands, mutually affected with admiration and regret for the virtues
and the calamities described. It is an awful contemplation, and in
sitting down in my now solitary chamber to its retrospection, I find
that nearly half a century has passed since its transactions swept
over Europe like a desolating blast. Then I wrote my little chronicle
when the birthright independence of Poland was no more; when she lay
in her ashes, and her mighty men were trodden into the dust; when the
pall of death overspread the country, and her widows and her orphans
wandered afar into the trackless wilderness of a barren world.

During this wide expatriation, some distinguished captives, who had
fallen in the field, and were counted among the slain, having been
found by the victors alive in their stiffened blood, were conveyed to
various prisons; and along with these was discovered the justly
feared, and not less justly deplored, General Kosciusko, who, though
long unheard of by the lone wanderers of his scattered host, had been
thus preserved by the supreme Lord of all, to behold again a remnant
of his own brightened in hope, and comforted by the honoring sympathy
of the good and brave in many nations.

Kosciusko was of noble birth, and early distinguished himself by his
spirit and talents for the martial field. Indeed, owing to the
belligerent position of Poland, situated in the midst of jealous and
encroaching nations, arms was the natural profession of every
gentleman in the kingdom, commerce and agriculture being the usual
pursuits of the middle classes. But it happened, in the early manhood
of Thaddeus Kosciusko, that the dangerous political Stromboli which
surrounded his country, and often aroused an answering blaze in that
since devoted land, slept in their fires; and Poland being at peace,
her young military students, becoming desirous of practising their
science in some actual campaign, resolved to try their strength
across the Atlantic. Hearing of the war then just commenced between
the British Colonies in America and the mother country, Kosciusko, as
a deciding spirit amongst his ardent associates, brought them to this
resolution. Losing no time, they embarked, passed over the wide ocean
of the Western world, and landing safe and full of their object,
offered their services to the army of independence. Having been
readily accepted, and immediately applied to use, the extraordinary
warrior talents of Kosciusko soon shone conspicuous, and were
speedily honored by his being appointed special aide-de-camp to
General Washington. His subsequent conduct in the camp and field was
consonant to its beginning, and he became a distinguished general in
rank and command long before his volunteered military services had
terminated. When the war ended, in the peace of mutual concessions
between the national parent and its children on a distant land, (a
point that is the duty of all Christian states to consider, and to
measure their ultimate conduct by,) the Poles returned to their own
country, where they soon met circumstances which caused them to call
forth their recently passed experience for her. But they had not
departed from the newly-established American State without
demonstrations of its warm gratitude; and Koscuisko, in particular,
with his not less popular compatriot and friend, Niemcivitz, the
soldier and the poet, bore away with them the pure esteem of the
brave population, the sighs of private friendship, and the tears of
an abiding regret from many fair eyes.

To recapitulate the memorable events of the threatened royal freedom
of Poland, by the three formidable foreign powers confederated for
its annihilation, and in repelling which General Kosciusko took so
gallant a lead, is not here necessary to connect our memoranda
concerning his unreceding struggles to maintain her political
existence. They have already been sketched in the preceding little
record of the actual scenes in which he and his equally devoted
compeers held their indomitable resistance till the fatal issue.
"Sarmatia lay in blood!" and the portion of that once great bulwark
of civilized Europe was adjudged by the paricidal victors to
themselves: a sentence like unto that passed on the worst of
criminals was thus denounced against Christendom's often best
benefactor, while the rest of Europe stood silently by, paralyzed or
appalled, during the immediate execution of the noble victim.

But though dismembered and thrown out from the "map of nations" by
the combination of usurping ambition and broken faith, and no longer
to be regarded as one in its "proud cordon," Poland retained within
herself (as has been well observed by a contemporary writer) "a mode
of existence unknown till then in the history of the world--a
domestic national vitality." Unknown, we may venture to say, except
in one extraordinary yet easily and reverentially understood
instance. We mean the sense of an integral national being, ever-
living in the bosoms of the people of Israel, throughout all their
different dispersions and captivities. And, perhaps, with respect to
this principle of a moral, political, and filial life, still drawing
its aliment from the inhumed heart of their mother-country, who, to
them, "is not dead but sleepeth!" may be explained, in some degree,
in reference to the above remark on the existing and individual
feeling amongst the wanderers of Poland, by considering some of the
best effects, latent in their "working together for good," in the
deep experience of her ancient variously-constituted modes of civil
government.

Under that of her early monarchs, the Piasts and their senate, she
sat beneath an almost patriarchal sceptre, they being native and
truly parental princes. John Sobieski was one of this description by
descent and just rule. Under the Jagellon dynasty, also sprung from
the soil, she held a yet more generalizing constitutional code, after
which she gradually adopted certain republican forms, with an
elective king--a strange contradiction in the asserted object, a
sound system for political freedom, but which, in fact, contained the
whole alchemy of a nation's "anarchical life," and ultimately
produced the entire destruction of the state. From the established
date of the elective monarchy, the kingdom became an arena for every
species of ambitious rivalry, and its sure consequences, the
interference of foreign influences; and hence rapidly advanced the
decline of the true independent spirit of the land, to stand in her
laws, and in her own political strength; her own impartial laws, the
palladium of the people and a native king the parental guardian of
their just administration. But, in sad process of time, "strangers of
Rome, of Gaul, and of other nations," in whose veins not a drop of
Sclavonian blood flowed, found means to successively seat themselves
on the throne of the Piasts, the Jagellons, and the Sobieskis, of
ancient Sarmatia; and the revered fabric fell, as by an earthquake,
to be registered no more amongst the kingdoms of the world.

THE EARLY EDUCATION OF KOSCIUSKO AND HIS COMPATRIOTS, WITH ITS
SUBSEQUENT EFFECTS ON THE PRINCIPLES OF THEIR LIVES.

Though their country appeared thus lost to them, they felt its
kingdom still in their minds--in the bosom of memory, in the
consciousness of an ancestry of bravery and of virtue; and though the
soil had passed away from the feet of those whose ancestors of "sword
or share" had trod it as sons and owners, and it now holds no place
for them but their fathers' graves, yet the root is deep in such
planting, and the tree, though invisible to the world, is seen and
nourished in the depths of their hearts by the dews of heaven.

The pages of universal history, sacred and profane, ancient and
modern, when opened with the conviction that He who made the world
governs it also, will best explain the _why_ of these changes in
the destiny of nations; and within half of the latter part of the
last century, and the nearly half of the present, awful have been the
pages to be read. Hence we may understand the vital influence of the
objects of education with regard to the principles inculcated,
whether with relation to individual interest or to the generalized
consideration of a people as a commonwealth or a kingdom. A kingdom
and a commonwealth may be considered the same thing, when the power
of both people and king are limited by just laws, established by the
long exercised wisdom of the nation, holding the whole powers of the
state in equilibrium; and in this sense, meaning "a royal
commonwealth," comprising, as in England, "kings, lords, and
commons," it is generally believed is intended to be understood the
term, "The republic of Poland, with its king."

The Polish nation, however, under all their dominions of government,
usually partook something of the policies and manners of the then
existing times. Yet they were always distinguished by a particular
chivalry of character, a brave freedom from all foreign and domestic
vassalage, and a generous disposition to respect and to assist the
neighboring nations to maintain the same independence they themselves
enjoyed. Though actual schools, or colleges, or written lore, might
not originally have had much to do with it, the continued practice of
old, well-formed customs held them in "the ways their fathers walked
in" and they found them those of "pleasantness" and true honor. But
the time came when literary dictation was to take the place