♦Education.♦ During this period John and his elder brother Mark were enjoying all the benefits of a careful education. Their father chiefly resided at his princely estate of Zolkiew, which had come to him through his wife--a domain as large as some of our English counties, and embracing a hundred and fifty villages. He had engaged as their tutor the learned Stanislas Orchowski; but he himself superintended their more important studies. The treatise which he has left upon education is alone enough to show how well the task must have been performed. Besides instructing them in several languages he imparted to them his own skill in music, painting, and the other fine arts; and they had the rare advantage of a home in which to the barbaric splendour of a Polish noble were added some of the refined tastes of an Italian court. Ardent and robust by nature, John early distinguished himself by his activity in hunting, and in the use of the small sword; and the traditions of his family soon taught him against whom his strength was to be employed. The inscription[18] on his great grandfather’s tomb in the neighbouring Dominican chapel, erected by his mother, aroused in his mind what may be called his life-purpose--to curb at all hazards the advance of the Turkish power. ♦His travels.♦ At length in 1643 the castellan sent his two sons to travel in the West. Their longest stay was made in France--at that time closely united to Poland by the marriage of Wladislas with a French princess[19]--but they also visited England[20] and Italy. At Paris they frequented the salon of the Duchesse de Longueville, sister of the great Condé; and it was here that an intimacy sprang up between John Sobieski and the French general, who, though only three years his senior, was already crowned with the laurels of Rocroi. The prince procured for his friend the honour of a commission in the king’s Grands Mousquetaires, and continued in correspondence with him during the remainder of his life. Quitting France before the disturbances of the Fronde, the brothers took the measure of the Ottoman power at Constantinople, and were preparing to pass into Asia, when news arrived which called them home to defend not only their country but their own fireside. It was to the effect that the Cossack serfs had revolted, and were carrying all before them.