Page:Kościuszko A Biography by Monika M Gardner.djvu/204

 Polish mother, Franciszka Krasinska, through whom the blood of Poland flows in the veins of the present Royal House of Italy. Nor was England left out. A book, now forgotten, but largely read in a past generation, in which Kościuszko's exploits figure, Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw, was sent to Kościuszko by its author. Jane Porter had heard her brother's description of the Polish hero, to whom he had spoken when Kościuszko was in London. She had seen the Cosway portrait. In his letter of thanks Kościuszko told her jestingly that he was glad that all her eulogies of him were "in a romance, because no one will believe them." Either from him or from a friend of his she received a gold ring or, as some say, a medal, with a representation of himself engraved upon it.

Through these last years Kościuszko's heart ever clung fondly to his own land and language. On the French letters he received his hand, as he read, was wont to trace Polish proverbs, Polish turns of phrase. Tears were seen to rise to his eyes as, gazing at the beautiful panorama from a favourite spot of his in the Jura, a French friend recited Arnault's elegy on the homeless and wandering leaf, torn from the parent oak, in which the Pole read the story of his own exile. Education of the lower classes, for which he had already made so strong a stand, continued to be one of the matters in which he most keenly interested himself. During his stay in Vienna he had drawn up a memorandum on the subject for those responsible for the department in the Kingdom of Poland then forming. One of his last expeditions before his death was to a great Swiss educational establishment where Pestalozzi's system had been