Karl declares, "You shall kill ME before you or he get into this Palace of Mietau!"-- and by Domestics merely, and armed private Gentlemen, he does maintain himself in said Palatial Mansion; valiantly indignant, for about six months; the Russian Battalions girdling him on all sides, minatory more and more, but loath to begin actual bloodshed.

[Rulhiere, ii.

(livre v.) 81 et antea; Hermann, v.

348 et seq.] A transaction very famed in those parts, and still giving loud voice in the Polish Books, which indeed get ever noisier from this point onward, till they end in inarticulate shrieks, as we shall too well hear.
Empress Catharine, after the lapse of six months, sends an Ambassador to Warsaw (Kayserling by name), who declares, in tone altogether imperative, that Czarish Majesty feels herself weary of such contumacy, weary generally of Polish Majesty's and Polish Republic's multifarious contumacies; and, in fine, cruelest of all, that she has troops on the frontier; that Courland is not the only place where she has troops.
What a stab to the poor old man! "Contumacies ?" Has not he been Russia's patient stepping-stone, all along; his anarchic Poland and he accordant in that, if in nothing else?
"Let us to Saxony," decides he passionately, "and leave all this." In Saxony his poor old Queen is dead long since; much is dead: Saxony and Life generally, what a Golgotha! He immediately sends word to Karl, "Give up Courland; I am going home!"-- and did hastily make his packages, and bid adieu to Warsaw, and, in a few weeks after to this anarchic world altogether.

Died at Dresden, 5th October, 1763.
Polish Majesty had been elected 5th October, 1733; died, you observe, 5th October, 1763;--was King of Poland ("King," save the mark!) for 30 years to a day.