[ [254] [John Casimir (1609-1672), Jesuit, cardinal, and king, was a Little-Polander, not to say a pro-Cossack, and suffered in consequence. At the time of his proclamation as King of Poland, November, 1649, Poland was threatened by an incursion of Cossacks. The immediate cause was, or was supposed to be, the ill treatment which [Bogdán Khmelnítzky] a Lithuanian had received at the hands of the Polish governor, Czaplinski. The governor, it was alleged, had carried off, ravished, and put to death Khmelnítzky's wife, and, not content with this outrage, had set fire to the house of the Cossack, "in which perished his infant son in his cradle." Others affirmed that the Cossack had begun the strife by causing the governor "to be publicly and ignominiously whipped," and that it was the Cossack's mill and not his house which he burnt. Be that as it may, Casimir, on being exhorted to take the field, declined, on the ground that the Poles "ought not to have set fire to Khmelnítzky's house." It is probably to this unpatriotic determination to look at both sides of the question that he earned the character of being an unwarlike prince. As a matter of fact, he fought and was victorious against the Cossacks and Tartars at Bereteskow and elsewhere. (See Mod. Univ. Hist., xxxiv. 203, 217; Puffend, Hist. Gener., 1732, iv. 328; and Histoire des Kosaques, par M. (Charles Louis) Le Sur, 1814, i. 321.)]
[ [255] [A.D. 1660 or thereabouts.]
[ [256] {212}[According to the editor of Voltaire's Works (Oeuvres, Beuchot, 1830, xix. 378, note 1), there was a report that Casimir, after his retirement to Paris in 1670, secretly married "Marie Mignot, fille d'une blanchisseuse;" and there are other tales of other loves, e.g. Ninon de Lenclos.]
[ [257] [According to the biographers, Mazeppa's intrigue took place after he had been banished from the court of Warsaw, and had retired to his estate in Volhynia. The pane [Lord] Falbowsky, the old husband of the young wife, was a neighbouring magnate. It was a case of "love in idlenesse."—Vide ante, "The Introduction to Mazeppa," [p. 201].]
[ [258] This comparison of a "salt mine" may, perhaps, be permitted to a Pole, as the wealth of the country consists greatly in the salt mines.
[ [259] {213}[It is improbable that Byron, when he wrote these lines, was thinking of Theresa Gamba, Countess Guiccioli. He met her for the first time "in the autumn of 1818, three days after her marriage," but it was not till April, 1819, that he made her acquaintance. (See Life, p. 393, and Letters, 1900, iv. 289.) The copy of Mazeppa sent home to Murray is in the Countess Guiccioli's handwriting, but the assertion (see Byron's Works, 1832, xi. 178), that "it is impossible not to suspect that the Poet had some circumstances of his own personal history, when he portrayed the fair Polish Theresa, her faithful lover, and the jealous rage of the old Count Palatine," is open to question. It was Marianna Segati who had "large, black, Oriental eyes, with that peculiar expression in them which is seen rarely among Europeans ... forehead remarkably good" (see lines 208-220); not Theresa Guiccioli, who was a "blonde," with a "brilliant complexion and blue eyes." (See Letters to Moore, November 17, 1816; and to Murray, May 6, 1819: Letters, 1900, iv. 8, 289, note 1.) Moreover, the "Maid of Athens" was called Theresa. Dr. D. Englaender, in his exhaustive monologue, Lord Byron's Mazeppa, pp. 48, sq., insists on the identity of the Theresa of the poem with the Countess Guiccioli, but from this contention the late Professor Kölbing (see Englische Studien, 1898, vol. xxiv. pp 448-458) dissents.]
[ [bs] {214} Until it proves a joy to die.—[MS. erased.]
[ [260] {215}[For the use of "electric" as a metaphor, compare Parisina, line 480, Poetical Works, 1900, iii. 524, note i.]
[ [bt] {216}
——but not
For that which we had both forgot.—[MS. erased.]