While Russia was marching her armies hastily forward, not only to support, or rather raise up once more, her unfortunate ally the King of Prussia, but to suppress any ebullition of popular spirit in Poland, Buonaparte received addresses from that country, which endeavoured to prevail on him to aid them in their views of regaining their independence. Their application was of a nature to embarrass him considerably. To have declared himself the patron of Polish independence, might have, indeed, brought large forces to his standard--might have consummated the disasters of Prussia, and greatly embarrassed even Russia herself; and so far policy recommended to Napoleon to encourage their hopes of her restored independence. But Austria had been a large sharer in the various partitions of Poland, and Austria, humbled as she had been, was still a powerful state, whose enmity might have proved formidable, if, by bereaving her of her Polish dominions, or encouraging her subjects to rebel, Buonaparte had provoked her to hostilities, at the time when he himself and the best part of his forces were engaged in the North of Europe. The same attempt would have given a very different character to the war, which Russia at present waged only in the capacity of the auxiliary of Prussia. The safety and integrity of the Russian empire, south of the Volga, depends almost entirely upon the preservation of those territories which she has acquired in Poland; and, if she had engaged in the war as a principal, Buonaparte was scarcely yet prepared to enter upon a contest with the immense power of that empire, which must be waged upon the very frontier of the enemy, and as near to their resources as he was distant from his own. It might have been difficult, also, to have stated any consistent grounds, why he, who had carved out so many new sovereignties in Europe with the point of the sword, should reprobate the principle of the partition of Poland. Influenced by these motives, the modern setter-up and puller-down of kings abstained from re-establishing the only monarchy in Europe, which he might have new-modelled to his mind, in the character not of a conqueror, but a liberator.