" Unknown, we may venture to say, except
in one extraordinary yet easily and reverentially understood
instance. We mean the sense of an integral national being, ever-
living in the bosoms of the people of Israel, throughout all their
different dispersions and captivities. And, perhaps, with respect to
this principle of a moral, political, and filial life, still drawing
its aliment from the inhumed heart of their mother-country, who, to
them, "is not dead but sleepeth!" may be explained, in some degree,
in reference to the above remark on the existing and individual
feeling amongst the wanderers of Poland, by considering some of the
best effects, latent in their "working together for good," in the
deep experience of her ancient variously-constituted modes of civil
government.
Under that of her early monarchs, the Piasts and their senate, she
sat beneath an almost patriarchal sceptre, they being native and
truly parental princes. John Sobieski was one of this description by
descent and just rule. Under the Jagellon dynasty, also sprung from
the soil, she held a yet more generalizing constitutional code, after
which she gradually adopted certain republican forms, with an
elective king--a strange contradiction in the asserted object, a
sound system for political freedom, but which, in fact, contained the
whole alchemy of a nation's "anarchical life," and ultimately
produced the entire destruction of the state.
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