Another, and to the Cardinal far more interesting, representative of the Polish language appeared in Rome during the same year. Mezzofanti had long felt deeply the wrongs of his oppressed fellow-Catholics in Poland and Lithuania. A few months before the Emperor’s arrival in Rome, they had been brought most painfully under his eyes by the visit of a refugee of that vast empire, and a victim of the atrocious policy which had become its ruling spirit—the heroic Makrena Mirazylawski, abbess of the Basilian convent of Minsk, the capital of the province of that name. The organized measures of coercion by which the Emperor endeavoured to compel the Catholic population of Lithuania and Poland, and the other Catholic subjects of the empire, into renunciation of their allegiance to the Holy See, and conformity with the doctrine and discipline of the Russian church, comprised all the members of the Catholic church in Russia without exception, even the nuns of the various communities throughout their provinces. Among these was a sisterhood of the Basilian order in the city of Minsk, thirty-five in number. The bishop of the diocese and the chaplain of the convent, having themselves conformed to the imperial will, first endeavoured to bend the resolution of these sisters by blandishment, but in the end sought by open violence to compel them into submission. But the nobleminded sisters, with their abbess at their head, firmly refused to yield; and, in the year 1839, the entire community (with the exception of one who died from grief and terror) were driven from their convent, and marched in chains to Witepsk, and afterwards to Polosk, where, with two other communities equally firm in their attachment to their creed, they were subjected, for nearly six years, to a series of cruelties and indignities of which it is difficult to think without horror, and which would revolt all credibility, were they not attested by authorities far from partial to the monastic institute.[542] Chained hand and foot; flogged; beaten with the fist and with clubs; thrown to the earth and trampled under foot; compelled to break stones and to labour at quarries and earthworks; dragged in sacks after a boat through a lake in the depth of winter; supplied only with the most loathsome food and in most insufficient quantity; lodged in cells creeping with maggots and with vermin; fed for a time exclusively on salt herrings, without a drop of water; tried, in a word, by every conceivable device of cruelty;—the perseverance of these heroic women is a living miracle of martyr-like fidelity. Nine of the number died from the effects of the excessive and repeated floggings to which, week after week, they were subjected, three fell dead in the course of their cruel tasks; two were trampled to death by their drunken guards; three were drowned in these brutal _noyades_; nine were killed by the falling of a wall, and five were crushed in an excavation, while engaged in the works already