♦As head of his family.♦ But we cannot acquit him of deplorable weakness in the management of his own family. A hasty passion had thrown him into the power of an unscrupulous and despotic woman, and his uxorious fondness left her only too much scope for the activity of her caprice. We have seen more than once that he could oppose her when his duty seemed clearly marked out for him; but, for the sake of his own peace, he allowed her to intermeddle without ceasing in the affairs of Poland. The only result of his indulgence was that very misery in his domestic circle which he had sought to avoid. Of the charge against him of avarice we have already spoken. His chivalrous enthusiasm and cultivated intelligence would have gone far to disprove it, even if the treasure which he left behind him had not been found to be only moderate. ♦His great services,♦ His services to his country were extraordinary, although he himself confessed that he could not arrest her fall. He found her at the opening of his career plunged in civil strife and beset with foreign enemies; he left her at its close with peace fully assured to her, and with her glory at its zenith. Within two years of his death the peace of Carlowitz was signed with the Turks, by which they renounced all claim to Kaminiec, Podolia, and the Ukraine. The fruit of his victories was thus fully reaped; but his efforts to revive commerce and to form an infantry among the serfs, which would have been the first step to their emancipation, were never afterwards renewed. ♦Could only retard the fall of Poland.♦ A patriot life like his may be said to have tried the institutions of his country, and to have found them wanting. After seventy-five years of anarchy, that dreaded Partition, which had been mooted in his day[149] but which he had postponed for a hundred years, was at length carried into effect. Austria, whom he had saved by his prowess, Prussia, whom he had hoped to reunite to his country, Russia, whom his ancestor[150] had laid at her feet--each took a share of the spoil. No other patriot arose to save Poland from her rapid decline; and John Sobieski may be called the last, as he was the greatest, of her independent kings. Oxford: A. Thomas Shrimpton and Son, 23 and 24, Broad Street. FOOTNOTES: [1] The burghers, however, were under a separate civil jurisdiction. A tribunal for administering this foreign or Teutonic law was established in 1347 in six principal towns. [2] Poland in the seventeenth century measured 2600 miles in circumference, while France measured only 2040. [3] _Cosmography_, by Peter Heylin, published in 1648, reprinted from his _Microcosmus_, published in 1621. [4] _Relatione di Polonia_ (1598), quoted by Ranke (App. No. 66 to his _History of the Popes_). The same Nuncio says the Poles confessed to him that they preferred a weak monarch to an able one.