their apartments, &c. As in Russia, there are no beds, but sofas. There are both stoves and fire-places, but no fire-grates. Wood is the only fuel, which they have in great abundance. Provisions of all kinds are plentiful; the bread is particularly fine, and very white.

The theatre is the only public place of amusement. The house is large and elegantly fitted up, and the performers lively and interesting. The pit is an open space, without seats. The drama generally consists of translations from the German with scarcely any native productions. The only writer of comedies whom we know is Bohomolec, who lived in the last century. Poland can boast of no literary pretensions. Its language is a dialect of the ancient Sclavonian; the alphabet consists of the common Roman characters, with the addition of nine duplicates, or accents, which are placed over certain letters, and which indicate a difference of sound. Learning has not flourished; nor could the calm pursuits of literature have taken place, in a country so constantly the scene of wars and oppression. Yet individual genius has sprung up, and Martin Cromer, the historian of his country; and particularly Copernicus,* the astronomer, will live as

* In the former part of this work we had occasion to notice the celebrity of this philosopher. He was born at Thorn in 1472, and died in 1543, at Frauensberg.

long as science exists. The Polish language is spoken uncommonly fast, and with a hissing sound. The Russians and Poles partly understand each other. French is more generally spoken than German; all the valets de place are Frenchinen.

The town is not fortified; round the suburbs are earthen ramparts, a few feet in height, is thrown up, but without any means of defence. The religion of the people is that of the Roman church. The offensive shew of crosses and crucifixes every where obtrudes itself; these crosses are about thirty feet in height, and the figure as large as life: some of them are covered with rags and adorned with wreaths of flowers; others represent a skeleton. Nothing can be more shocking than this display of religious torture. The common people are extremely ignorant, and many of the priests are little better. One of the convents, which we visited, contained several fathers; they were habited in long loose white woollen cloaks, with a small black velvet cap on their heads. Few of them could speak any language but their own; and their time was taken up in grinding a small organ, in order to teach a canary bird to imitate its sounds.

The present population of Warsaw is estimated at fifty thousand individuals, of whom twenty thousand are Jews, and who seem to manage all

the trade of the city. In short, the whole retail trade of Lithuania and Poland is carried on by the Jews; their number, throughout the country, is calculated at above two millions, which is probably the greatest collection of Jews in any part of the world. It is a singular circumstance that they are not allowed any place of public worship in Warsaw.

The Vistula is, here, a noble river; it is nearly one quarter of a mile in breadth, deep and rapid. It takes its rise on the northern frontiers of Hungary, about one hundred and fifty miles to the south of Cracow, which it passes, and continues, as the boundary line, between the Duchy of Warsaw and Hungary, as far as Sendomirz ; whence it takes a north-westerly course, and, after a passage of one hundred and twenty miles, passes Warsaw, and continues by Plock, Thorn, Culm, Graudenz and Marienwerder, to Dantzick, where it falls into the Baltic Sea; completing a course of nearly seven hundred miles. From Cracow it is navigable by long flat barges. From Warsaw to Dantzick the voyage is most agreeable, and usually performed in from two to three days.

CHAP. XII.

Berlin, October, 1814.

IN quitting the capital of Poland, we could not but think of its present and its former state. We could not forget its once proud independence, when, with a population of fifteen millions of people, it supported its own sovereigns, and commanded the respect of other nations. We could not but lament to see so fine a country so devastated by its conquest; so tortured by its tyrannies; and so helpless to its interests. Distorted into every shape in which the agonies of tyranny could writhe them, its governments have assumed every form which the chimeras of despotism, or the madness of ambition, could invent. The fate of Poland must ever excite sympathy. With all the materials of freedom, independence, and glory, she has sunk to nothing;-her name is scarcely known among nations; and those very materials, which once constituted her pride, now constitute her misery. In the manufactory of her misfortunes they have been melted down

and refined into the implements of the basest born slavery. Long torn from her parent stock of nobles; stripped of her rights, her virtues, and her freedom; dismantled, dismembered, trodden, and laid waste, she now, like the withered branch of the sapless tree, which bends but to break, bows down her head, shelters herself by her humility, and submits to invasion. Swept by its streams, and blasted by its storms, lowly and prostrate she now lies, drooping to her parent earth; and never will she again take her rank amid the nations of that earth; never will the bright star of liberty again shed its light over her plains, or sound its lay in the halls of her barons, until the kindred spirit of a Stanislaus, a Poniatowsky, or a Kosciusko shall again appear-shall again break her chains and awaken into life the genius of her freedom. With these she has fallen-with them her bright sun has set; and long, over their tombs, may its last rays play, till her sufferings be buried in the night of time.

Poland must now submit to a northern potentate: she must increase the bounds of the boundless dominions of Russia. If the banks of the Vistula are to be included within these bounds, then the eastern provinces of Prussia may yet feel the inconvenience of its insolated situation, and her rich and commercial ports, from Dantzick to Memel, become a prey to the power of Russia.