dispensation, national misfortunes pursued them, and family sorrows
pierced their souls, the weakness of a murmur never sunk the dignity
of their sustaining fortitude, nor did the firmness of that virtue
harden the amiable sensibilities of their hearts.

To exhibit so truly heroic and endearing a portrait of what every
Christian man ought to be,--for the law of God is the same to the
poor as to the rich,--I have chosen one of that illustrious and, I
believe, now extinct race for the subject of my sketch; and the more
aptly did it present itself, it being necessary to show my hero
amidst scenes and circumstances ready to exercise his brave and
generous propensities, and to put their personal issues to the test
on his mind. Hence Poland's sadly-varying destinies seemed to me the
stage best calculated for the development of any self-imposed task.

There certainly were matters enough for the exhibition of all that
human nature could suffer and endure, and, alas! perish under, in the
nearly simultaneous but terrible regicidal revolution of France; but
I shrunk from that as a tale of horror, the work of demons in the
shapes of men. It was a conflict in which no comparisons, as between
man and man, could exist; and may God grant that so fearful a
visitation may never be inflicted on this world again. May the
nations of this world lay its warnings to their hearts!

It sprung from a tree self-corrupted, which only could produce such
fruits: the demon hierarchy of the French philosophers, who had long
denied the being of that pure and Almighty God, and who, in the
arrogance of their own deified reason, and while in utter subjection
to the wildest desires of their passions, published their profane and
polluted creed amongst all orders of the people, and the natural and