"Towards sun-set every one hurries out of doors to breathe freely. Such a passeggiata or promenade is here indispensable, and to remain at home at this time were to violate the first rule for the preservation of health. The houses are now so heated through and through by the sun, that no cool nook can be found in them; on the port, out of the town, in sight of the dark sea, one breathes under less oppression. The Maltese passeggiata differs strikingly from an Italian and a Sicilian, in the entire absence of carriages, which are useless upon this uneven ground. Great and small, all walk indiscriminately along the smooth pavement, beside the harbour, and out through the gates. South of the town lies the only Valetta garden, where several contiguous rows of trees are to be seen; a rarity throughout the island. Amongst the fortifications indeed, and under the shade of the high walls, a custom-house officer or a bridge-inspector has here and there insinuated a little garden, at which the government, in the expectation of a long peace, connives. There, looking down from the precipitous ramparts, one sees the neatly ordered beds of culinary vegetables; the eye reposes refreshingly upon their soft verdure, upon the varied tints of the numerous flowers. Here and there are seen orange hedges and different fruit trees; and, beside an inner gate, a banana tree spreads wide its gigantic leaves, six or eight feet in length; a strangely marvellous apparition, that distinctly brings the vicinity of the tropics before the astonished eyes of the son of the north."

We now lay down the pen, but look forward with pleasure to our traveller's wanderings in the Levant, which we shall lose no time in presenting to the reading public of England.

ART. V.-Thaddäus Kosciuszko, nach seinem öffentlichem und häuslichen leben geschildert, von Karl Falkenstein, Königlich Sachsischem Bibliothekar, &c. &c. (Thaddeus Kosciuszko, delineated in his public and domestic Life, by Charles Falkenstein, Royal Saxon Librarian, &c. &c.) Svo. Leipzig. 1834. THERE is in the Polish character a something of barbaric splendour and rudeness, of the very spirit of Orientalism, mingled with European education and refinement, an ardour of patriotic valour, alloyed by versatility, both no doubt heightened, if not produced, by the strange, exciting, or rather distracting constitution of the old and truly republican monarchy of Poland,—combined with such a gay, light, mirthful gallantry-whence the Poles were once termed the French of the north-that all, blending together, give the nation a peculiar hold upon the imagination. Then, although the history of Poland is but little known to the general reader, what is known breathes a tone of romance, yet further enhancing the effect of those qualities with which it so well harmonizes.

Nor has this tone of romance in actual life even now faded, however sadly or harshly coloured in later years by those reverses, that desolation, and ruin, which, in some measure,, originated in the very qualities we have enumerated. No! Never, even in these our utilitarian days, has Polish romance been deadened into the cold common-place of modern philosophic civilization.

The interest which this gallant and vivacious, but somewhat fickle nation, is certain to awaken in every breast, has within the last few years been wonderfully augmented and enlivened by the fearful struggle, more nobly and generously than judiciously audacious, in which they have been engaged against the northern Colossus, with whose overwhelming might they had already been proved utterly unable to cope, even when they themselves were still a nation, and when that Colossus was not yet further strengthened by provinces torn from Sweden, Persia, and Turkey, as well as by a large portion of their own territories. The Poles were no doubt unwise, we have already said so, in rising against Russia; but even the extravagant temerity of enthusiastic patriotism and love of liberty kindles a sympathetic glow in the heart, whilst the calculating despondency of selfish prudence is approved with feelings more akin to dislike than to indifference. And if, as we doubt there is but too much reason to apprehend, that rash insurrection, which has deprived Poland of even the poor shadow of nationality restored to her by the congress of Vienna, was instigated by the liberal party, as they proudly style themselves, in France and England, if this same party-from a cautious fear of provoking either the active enmity of Russia, or the equally formidable active hostility of the tax-payers at home, -afterwards left the Poles whom they had instigated to insurrection, to perish unaided,—if we say England has thus even in the remotest degree co-operated in the final annihilation of Poland, although a bitter and remorseful shame must rob our sympathy of the pleasing self-satisfaction usually blending with and sweetening that emotion-those very painful feelings must needs deepen our sympathy in every thing relative to a country, once, under her great Sobieski, the deliverer of Austria, perhaps of Europe, from Turkish bondage.

Touched with sympathies such as these, combined with a desire to institute a comparison between the struggle and the disasters of 1794, and those of 1831, we took up Falkenstein's Life of Kosciuszko, which, though originally published some few years ago, has, from feelings in a great measure analagous to our own, been lately reprinted with additions and corrections. Our main object in opening the volume was disappointed. Of the political condition of Poland prior to the new constitution, or even to the

year 1794, of the circumstances which immediately produced the insurrection, and led to the final partition of the remnant of the kingdom then left, the author tells us no more than is actually indispensable to the intelligibility of Kosciuszko's share in the transactions of those unhappy times; and for this reserve he assigns a reason more satisfactory we trust to himself than it is likely to be to his readers. He says in his preface:

"The narrow limits of biography do not allow of a regular development of the origin, progress, and final catastrophe of that insurrection, in which oppressed Poland was compelled to seek her last hope of deliverance. It will not therefore excite surprise that no more is said of the revolution than what, as being the result of Kosciuszko's influence, is absolutely necessary to place his mode of thinking and acting in the proper light."

But must not the professionally distrustful critic suspect that this development may be purposely reserved, with other matters, for the new work which the author soon afterwards tells us that he meditates?

"The rise and growth of the Polish kingdom, together with the delineation of the characters of their greatest kings, are reserved for a new historical work."

The life of a man who owes his celebrity to his having been the leader and instigator of his countrymen in a desperate and splendid although unsuccessful attempt to maintain or recover the independence of their common country, seems to be so inextricably involved with the history of that country, at least during the period of his own activity, that, upon reading the first of these passages we were about to throw aside the volume with a sneer at its absurd plan, but the charm which resides in the mere name of every martyr to liberty, tempted us forward; and although, as we read on, the author did not greatly rise in our estimation, we still read on, and now are glad that we did so. Nor, we think, will our readers be otherwise than pleased when we shall have imparted to them a sketch, although but little political, of the life of this eminent public man. In fact what we have said of the Polish nation applies with peculiar force to the nation's champion, Kosciuszko. His whole life is a romance, and as such really quite refreshing in these matter-of-fact days of steamengines, rail-roads, and compendious compilations of cheap literature.

Of this romance, the Polish insurrection against Russian ascendency forms scarcely a volume; a few chapters merely, or an act or two of the great drama: and, perhaps, not the least extraordinary of its features is, that Kosciuszko should have become so

decidedly a public character, so thoroughly the idol of his country, the one man without whom resistance was impossible, whilst so very short a period of his life was dedicated to the active service of his country, at least in any prominently public character. The insurrection of which he was the leader was put down in less than a year, and prior to that, he had little opportunity to signalize himself at home except in one battle.

Our sketch of his adventurous life must be prefaced by a few words concerning the qualifications of his present biographer. It appears that Falkenstein, as a youth, was intimately acquainted with Kosciuszko during the last years of his life, from the circumstance of his (Falkenstein's) being the chosen associate of one of the young Zeltners, in whose family the exiled veteran in his declining years resided, and by whom he was most tenderly revered and cherished. From Kosciuszko's own lips Falkenstein thus heard many details, many incidents of his earlier and eventful career; others he learned from the Zeltners; and yet more he gathered from those Poles, whether exiles or Russian subjects, to whom his connexion with the venerated patriot introduced him. He thus seems peculiarly well calculated to give those slight or familiar anecdotes to which biography owes its chief fascination, and the regular historical web into which these are to be interwoven he professes to have derived from a variety of publications upon Kosciuszko and Poland in almost every living language. Did his talent for arrangement and composition equal his diligence in collecting materials and his honest zeal for his hero, we could have desired no better biographer. We shall endeavour in our sketch to spare our readers any inconvenience from the disproportion between the former and the latter qualities.

Thaddeus Kosciuszko was a Lithuanian, and born in the year 1746, according to Falkenstein. We wish he had given his authority for this date, inasmuch as other writers place Kosciuszko's birth in 1756, and some circumstances in his life rather tend to render this last the more probable epoch. He was the only son of Casimir Kosciuszko, a nobleman, but of the class denominated the lesser nobility, of which the most that can possibly be predicated is, that it may perhaps answer to the English small squirearchy, though we are not very sure whether it approach not nearer to our yeomanry, since we are told that—

"Only by the clear judgment and unwearied diligence with which he constantly applied himself to agricultural improvement, could he augment his income sufficiently to support himself with his wife, Thaddeus, and two younger daughters, in comfort and respectability.*** Through the instrumentality of this noble friend, (Prince Adam Czartoryski, under whom Casimir Kosciuszko had served in his youth,) the father, whose indigence

prevented his either paying instructors for his children at home, or sending them to school, obtained admission for Thaddeus into the Cadet Institution which King Stanislaus Poniatowski had recently established at Warsaw."

By those means of instruction, for which he was thus indebted to the honourable patronage of friendship, and to the wise liberality of the well-meaning, although unhappily feeble-minded king, the youthful Thaddeus laboured, with a diligence well nigh unexampled, to profit. We are assured, upon the authority of one of his brother cadets, that

"Such was Kosciuszko's ardour for the acquisition of knowledge that, in order to make sure of rising at three o'clock every morning, he commissioned the stove-heater to wake him by pulling a string, of which one end was tied about his arm, while the other passed out under the door of his room. If, when sitting up late at his writing-table, sleep overpowered him before he had completed his day's task, he kept himself awake by either putting his feet into cold water or repeatedly bathing his forehead and neck.

"His favourite studies were now, as they had been in early childhood in his father's house, mathematics and history; and the susceptibility of his imagination for every thing elevated probably led him to anticipate the fair fruits that these studies would produce during his future career... Such was the esteem he inspired, that he was one of the twelve youths selected by the professors as entitled, by their superiority in character and in science, to contend for the prize of a travelling allowance- the King of Poland having deposited a sum of money, from which annually the travelling expenses of the four most distinguished youths of the Warsaw cadet corps were to be defrayed, that they might improve themselves in mathematics and other sciences under the tuition of foreign instructors. These twelve underwent a severe examination, when Kosciuszko's industry and pre-eminent talents insured his being one of the chosen. For some years he prosecuted his studies in the military academy at Versailles, under the especial protection of his original patron, the highly meritorious Prince Adam Czartoryski, who did so much for the intellectual cultivation of Poland."

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Upon his return to Poland, Kosciuszko entered the army, and, as a proof of the king's approbation of his abilities and application, almost immediately obtained a company. But this, the natural career of a poor nobleman possessing military talents, was speedily interrupted, at least in his native land, by the influence of that most universal of passions, against the arbitrary power which not even the wisest can shield themselves. Kosciuszko fell in love with a maiden, raised, by birth and fortune, far above his pretensions, inasmuch as she was the daughter of one of the grand dignitaries of the kingdom, Joseph Sosnowski, marshal of Lithuania and vice-general of the crown. Towards the end of the year 1777, circumstances, which he then esteemed most fortunate,