It being discovered that some Masovian regiments in the neighborhood of Warsaw yet retained their arms, they were ordered by the foreign envoys to lay them down. A few, thinking denial vain, obeyed; but bolder spirits followed Thaddeus Sobieski towards South Prussia, whither he had directed his steps on the arrest of his grandfather, and where he had gathered and kept together a handful of brave men, still faithful to their liberties. His name alone collected numbers in every district through which he marched. Persecution from their adversary as well as admiration of Thaddeus had given a resistless power to his appearance, look, and voice, all of which had such an effect on the peasantry, that they eagerly crowded to his standard, whilst their young lords committed themselves without reserve to his sole judgment and command. The Prussian ambassador, hearing of this, sent to Stanislaus to command the grandson of Sobieski to disband his troops. The king refusing, and his answer being communicated to the Russian envoy also, war was renewed with redoubled fury. The palatine remained in confinement, hopeless of obtaining release without the aid of stratagem. His country's enemies were too well aware of their interest to give freedom to so active an opponent. They sought to vex his spirit with every mental torture; but he rather received consolation than despair in the reports daily brought to him by his jailers. They told him "that his grandson continued to carry himself with such insolent opposition in the south, it would be well if the empress, at the termination of the war, allowed him to escape with banishment to Siberia." But every reproach thus levelled at the palatine he found had been bought by some new success of Thaddeus; and instead of permitting their malignity to intimidate his age or alarm his affection, he told the officer (who kept guard in his chambers) that if his grandson were to lose his head for fidelity to Poland, he should behold him with as proud an eye mounting the scaffold as entering the streets of Warsaw with her freedom in his hand. "The only difference would be," continued Sobieski, "that as the first cannot happen until all virtue be dead in this land, I should regard his last gasp as the expiring sigh of that virtue which, by him, had found a triumph even under the axe. But for the second, it would be joy unutterable to behold the victory of justice over rapine and violence! But, either way, Thaddeus Sobieski is still the same--ready to die or ready to live for his country, and equally worthy of the sacred halo with which posterity would encircle his name forever."