Everybody knows we mean West-Preussen; Partition of Poland; bloodiest picture in the Book of Time, Sarmatia's fall unwept without a crime;--and that we have come upon a very intricate part of our poor History.
No prudent man--especially if to himself, as is my own poor case in regard to it, the subject have long been altogether dead and indifferent--would wish to write of the Polish Question.

For almost a hundred years the Polish Question has been very loud in the world; and ever and anon rises again into vocality among Able Editors, as a thing pretending not to be dead and buried, but capable of rising again, and setting itself right, by good effort at home and abroad.

Not advisable, beyond the strict limits of compulsion, to write of it at present! The rather as the History of it, any History we have, is not an intelligible series of events, but a series of vociferous execrations, filling all Nature, with nothing left to the reader but darkness, and such remedies against despair as he himself can summon or contrive.
"Rulhiere's on that subject," says a Note which I may cite, "is the only articulate-speaking Book to which mankind as yet can apply; [Cl.
Rulhiere, _Histoire de l'Anarchie de Pologne_ (Paris, 1807), 4 vols.
12mo.] and they will by no means find that a sufficient one.

Rulhiere's Book has its considerable merits; but it absolutely wants those of a History; and can be recognized by no mind as an intelligible cosmic Portraiture of that chaotic Mass of Occurrences: chronology, topography, precision of detail by time and place; scene, and actors on scene, remain unintelligible.

Rulhiere himself knew Poland, at least had looked on it from Warsaw outwards, year after year, and knew of it what an inquiring Secretary of Legation could pick up on those terms, which perhaps, after all, is not very much.