association between fact and fancy, was published by its author with
a natural apprehension of its reception by the critical part of the
public. She had not, indeed, written it with any view to publication,
but from an almost resistless impulse to embody the ideas and
impressions with which her heart and mind were then full. It was
written in her earliest youth; dictated by a fervent sympathy with
calamities which had scarcely ceased to exist, and which her eager
pen sought to portray; and it was given to the world, or rather to
those who might feel with her, with all the simple-hearted enthusiasm
which saw no impediment when a tale of virtue or of pity was to be
told.

In looking back through the avenue of life to that time, what events
have occurred, public and private, to the countries and to the
individuals named in that tale! to persons of even as lofty names and
excellences, of our own and other lands, who were mutually affected
with me in admiration and regret for the virtues and the sorrows
described! In sitting down now to my retrospective task, I find
myself writing this, my second preface to the story of "Thaddeus of
Warsaw," just thirty years from the date of its first publication.
Then, I wrote when the struggle for the birthright independence of
Poland was no more; when she lay in her ashes, and her heroes in
their wounds; when the pall of death spread over the whole country,
and her widows and orphans travelled afar.

In the days of my almost childhood,--that is, eight years before I
dipped my pen in their tears,--I remember seeing many of those
hapless refugees wandering about St. James's Park. They had sad
companions in the like miseries, though from different enemies, in
the emigrants from France; and memory can never forget the variety of