"The Diet rely on the justice of Poland--rely on her belief that they would not betray the citadel she confided to their keeping. Her preservation is dearer to them than their lives; but fate seems to be on the side of their destroyer. Fresh insults have been heaped upon their heads and new hardships have been imposed upon them. To prevent all deliberations on this debasing treaty, they are not only surrounded by foreign troops, and dared with hostile messages, but they have been violated by the arrest of their prime members, whilst those who are still suffered to possess a personal freedom have the most galling shackles laid upon their minds. "Therefore, I, the King of Poland, enervated by age, and sinking under the accumulated weight of my kingdom's afflictions, and also we, the members of the Diet, declare that, being unable, even by the sacrifice of our lives, to relieve our country from the yoke of its oppressors, we consign it to our children and the justice of Heaven. "In another age, means may be found to rescue it from chains and misery; but such means are not put in our power. Other countries neglect us. Whilst they reprobate the violations which a neighboring nation is alleged to have committed against rational liberty, they behold, not only with apathy but with approbation, the ravages which are now desolating Poland. Posterity must avenge it. We have done. We accede in silence, for the reasons above mentioned, to the treaty laid before us, though we declare that it is contrary to our wishes, to our sentiments, and to our rights." Thus, in November, 1793, compressed to one fourth of her dimensions by the lines of demarcation drawn by her invaders, Poland was stripped of her rank in Europe; her "power delivered up to strangers, and her beauty into the hands of her enemies!" Ill-fated people! Nations will weep over your wrongs; whilst the burning blush of shame, that their fathers witnessed such wrongs unmoved, shall cause the tears to blister as they fall. During these transactions, the Countess Sobieski continued in solitude at Villanow, awaiting with awful anxiety the termination of those portentous events which so deeply involved her own comforts with those of her country. Her father was in prison, her son at a distance with the army. Sick at heart, she saw the opening of that spring which might be the commencement only of a new season of injuries; and her fears were prophetic.