of embodying into shape should be founded on the actual scenes of
Kosciusko's sufferings, and moulded out of his virtues!

To have made him the ostensible hero of the tale, would have suited
neither the modesty of his feelings nor the humbleness of my own
expectation of telling it as I wished. I therefore took a younger and
less pretending agent, in the personification of a descendant of the
great John Sobieski.

But it was, as I have already said, some years after the partition of
Poland that I wrote, and gave for publication, my historical romance
on that catastrophe. It was finished amid a circle of friends well
calculated to fan the flame which had inspired its commencement some
of the leading heroes of the British army just returned from the
victorious fields of Alexandria and St. Jean d'Acre; and, seated in
my brother's little study, with the war-dyed coat in which the
veteran Abercrombie breathed his last grateful sigh, while, like
Wolfe, he gazed on the boasted invincible standard of the enemy,
brought to him by a British soldier,--with this trophy of our own
native valor on one side of me, and on the other the bullet-torn vest
of another English commander of as many battles,--but who, having
survived to enjoy his fame, I do not name here,--I put my last stroke
to the first campaigns of Thaddeus Sobieski.

When the work was finished, some of the persons near me urged its
being published. But I argued, in opposition to the wish, its
different construction to all other novels or romances which had gone
before it, from Richardson's time-honored domestic novels to the
penetrating feeling in similar scenes by the pen of Henry Mackenzie;
and again, Charlotte Smith's more recent, elegant, but very