With the catastrophe of so leading a personage this work may properly reach the termination which its limits now demand. For the winter march by which Sobieski withdrew his forces to his own frontier, and the fortresses which he picked up by the way, his negotiations with Tekeli, and his passing successes over the Turks, the reader who wishes to pursue the subject will do well to consult his correspondence so often quoted, and the ample work of M. de Salvandy. From the above pages, concerned as they have been with a principal passage in the public career of one of the greatest characters in modern history, some faint idea may be derived of his qualities as a soldier. As a king, a statesman, an orator, and a man of letters, he must be estimated from other and fuller sources. After learning what he was in all these respects, we shall be prone to conjecture what he might have been. As a husband and a father, if he had not married a bad and mischievous woman, _daturam progeniem vitiosiorem_—as a commander, if, instead of leading ill-disciplined levies to transient victories by the example and personal exposure of a partisan, he had brandished the staff of a Marlborough or an Eugene at the head of a permanent and organized force—as a king and a statesman, if his better fortune had placed him at the head, not of a horde of turbulent, intriguing, and ungovernable slave-owners, but of a civilized, free, and united people—it is scarcely too much to suppose that he might have realized the greater projects which it is known entered into his large conception, that the Turk would have been rolled back upon Asia, and that Greece might have dated her emancipation from the seventeenth century.
[20] In the intervals of war and business the King had always been devoted to the chase. One of his objects of pursuit was the aurochs, now confined to a single forest of Lithuania, where alone it continues its species under imperial protection. One of the most eminent of living geologists, Sir R. I. Murchison, has broached a theory, founded at least on a profound investigation of the features of the district, that the species is a sole survivor of one of those great geological changes which have obliterated other forms of animal life. Sobieski’s Queen wore a girdle of the skin of this animal. Down to a recent period it was an object of royal chase in Poland. Sir C. Hanbury Williams, in a letter from Brodi, describes a royal battue in which many of them were surrounded and driven over a steep bank into the river.