Few men combined like the Prince Koslowski the liking for work, and the intelligent appreciation of it, joined to a remarkable and fiery eloquence. His learning was very varied and extensive, his memory most admirable. History had no secrets for him; he had mastered all the diplomatic transactions which for many centuries had regulated the fate of Europe. His manner of judging men was that of a philosophic statesman. All the political questions so often twisted out of their natural shape by private interest he regarded in the light of a friend of humanity. A staunch partisan of all progress, he was fond of telling how he, like another illustrious personage already mentioned, had received equally deserved chastisement at the hands of an Austrian postillion. While travelling, when very young, on the frontiers of Prussia, he had struck the driver, whose horses did not keep pace with the traveller’s impatience. The driver vigorously applied his whip to the back of the ’prentice diplomatist. ‘Well, it was that Austrian who gave me my first lesson in liberalism,’ said the prince, laughing, a decade later. Koslowski quickly climbed the first rungs of the diplomatic ladder. Minister-plenipotentiary to the King of Sardinia, he had the good fortune to save the lives of several shipwrecked Frenchmen who had been made prisoners. Napoleon immediately sent the Legion of Honour to the representative of a sovereign with whom at that very moment he happened to be at war. The reward redounded as much to the honour of the Russian ambassador as to that of the French Emperor. It was at Cagliari, about the same period, that the Prince Koslowski became acquainted with the Duc d’Orléans, afterwards the King of the French. A similar love of knowledge, a similar desire for fathoming most things, drew these two together. Both had spent their earlier years in serious and assiduous studies. The chequered and adventurous life of the French prince had strengthened the studies with the experience derived from misfortune. These two took long walks by the sea-shore, and passed in review the gigantic events of which practically they were the eye-witnesses. Sometimes they read Shakespeare, whose language and whose beauties were equally familiar to them; and those readings were rarely interrupted except by the cries of admiration of the Russian diplomatist or the subtle and learned comments of the French exile.