Thaddeus of Warsaw | Page 3

in its adversity. An old friend of my family
was amongst them; his own warm heart encouraging the enthusiasm of
ours, he took my brother Robert to visit the Polish veteran, then lodging
at Sablonière's Hotel, in Leicester Square. My brother, on his return to
us, described him as a noble looking man, though not at all handsome,
lying upon a couch in a very enfeebled state, from the effects of
numerous wounds he had received in his breast by the Cossacks' lances
after his fall, having been previously overthrown by a sabre stroke on
his head. His voice, in consequence of the induced internal weakness,
was very low, and his speaking always with resting intervals. He wore
a black bandage across his forehead, which covered a deep wound there;
and, indeed, his whole figure bore marks of long suffering.
Our friend introduced my brother to him by name, and as "a boy
emulous of seeing and following noble examples." Kosciusko took him
kindly by the hand, and spoke to him words of generous
encouragement, in whatever path of virtuous ambition he might take.
They never have been forgotten. Is it, then, to be wondered at,
combining the mute distress I had so often contemplated in other
victims of similar misfortunes with the magnanimous object then
described to me by my brother, that the story of heroism my young
imagination should think 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 sentimental love
stories. But the most formidable of all were the wildly interesting
romances of Anne Radcliffe, whose magical wonders and mysteries
were then the ruling style of the day. I urged, how could any one expect
that the admiring readers of such works could consider my simply-told
biographical legend of Poland anything better than a dull union
between real history and a matter-of-fact imagination?
Arguments were found to answer all this; and being excited by the
feelings which had dictated my little work, and encouraged by the
corresponding characters with whom I daily associated, I ventured the

essay. However, I had not read the sage romances of our older times
without turning to some account the lessons they taught to adventurous
personages of either sex; showing that even the boldest knight never
made a new sally without consecrating his shield with some impress of
acknowledged reverence. In like manner, when I entered the field with
my modern romance of Thaddeus of Warsaw, I inscribed the first page
with the name of the hero of Acre. That dedication will be found
through all its successive editions, still in front of the title-page; and
immediately following it is a second inscription, added, in after years,
to the memory of the magnanimous patriot and exemplary man,
Thaddeus Kosciusko, who had first filled me with ambition to write the
tale, and who died in Switzerland, A. D. 1817, fuller of glory than of
years. Yet, if life be measured by its vicissitudes and its virtues, we
may justly say, "he was gathered in his ripeness."
After his visit to old friends in the United States,--where, in his youth,