66 CONSTANTINE AND HIS PRINCESS. 



was the every-day practice in the post-office of Warsaw. But I 

 had no time then for reflection, still less for remonstrance, for I was 

 too glad and anxious to use my recovered liberty ; and I hastened 

 to fly from the deadly influence of a government where open vio- 

 lence was abetted by secret treachery, where tyranny based its 

 throne upon fraud and espionage, where usurpation mocked at the 

 guarantees of the whole of Europe. 



For Constantine himself, I was never able to overcome the dis- 

 gust with which his character inspired me ; for although, as I have 

 said, no striking instances of his violent and wanton cruelty were 

 obtruded upon my observation, evidences there were enough in every 

 corner of the capital of his crushing oppression ; and anecdotes were 

 too rife and too well authenticated not to produce their impression 

 upon my mind. It were useless to relate how he compelled an un- 

 fortunate Officer of Dragoons to leap again and again over a pyra- 

 mid of bayonets until both horse and man sunk dead with the last 

 effort ; or how he shot a Saxon postilion dead on the spot, with the 

 most Irish intention of inducing him to drive faster : these with his 

 diabolical treatment of a respectable female who was so unfortunate 

 as to attract his attention, and his systematic persecution of his first 

 wife, with a hundred others, were true tales, which, although only 

 whispered in secret and under the breath in Warsaw, have long since 

 been current through the rest of the Continent. His cowardice, too, 

 for that vice must always form an integral part of such a character 

 as his, was sufficiently evinced not only by the low and shameful 

 practices by which he so long guarded his usurped dominion, but by 

 his last exertion of authority in Warsaw. He left his favourite 

 generals and aides-de-camp those whose attachment to his person 

 gave them at least some claims upon his consideration to be cut 

 down by an infuriated and successful mob ; while he, coward-like, 

 fled the palace through a secret passage from his bed-chamber. The 

 lives of his brave and devoted adherents had gained him time to 

 place his person in safety. Among the first fell Sass. Poor Sass ! 

 though circumstances had placed him in a most unenviable position, 

 his heart was in the right place : at least he deserved a better fate 

 than to fling away his life for a tyrant. The master's hour was not 

 yet come : and it was only in the effort to re-acquire by the Russian 

 bayonet what he had lost by his own tyranny and oppression, that 

 perhaps a violent, at least a painful and unregarded death closed a 

 life of violence ; and the character of Constantine now belongs to 

 the history of the Polish revolution. 



We shall say of him, that though he must have possessed some 

 good points in private, (else whence could have originated the at- 

 tachment of his second wife and the undoubted devotion of his 

 favourites ?) yet these qualities were forgotten and overborne in that 

 deadly and all-pervading stain, that wantonness of spirit, which, 

 attaining no end of government and adding nothing to his power, can 

 only be termed a sensual appetite for cruelty. Posterity will mark 

 him as the Dionysius, or rather the Nero, of Modern Europe. 



For the Poles themselves, an utter disregard of their civil rights 

 and constitutional privileges, a long series of unequalled oppressions, 



