Page:Julian Niemcewicz - Notes of my Captivity in Russia.djvu/203

sentence unintelligible, took the book to Procurator General Samoilow's, but he understood it no better, and this increased his suspicion.” In short, the book passed through the hands of many great personages of the empire, who all agreed that the sentence must be written in a mysterious language, and as they at last remembered that the old metropolitan Bishop of St. Petersburg was a learned philologer, they sent him the cabalistic writing; and it was he who at last passed the definitive sentence in this matter, declaring that the words in question were written in a known language, and that they contained nothing dangerous to the Gracious Sovereign of all the Russias. Being anxious to know what it was that could so long puzzle the learned and the great of the realm, I took the book, opened it, and found to my great surprize the following words: “Ex libris Stanislai Sokolnicki!” For the first time since my imprisonment I laughed, and laughed heartily. This then is the empire where, according to Voltaire, the arts and