over Sweden, depicting him, as our own Cosway did afterwards, reclining, "his face," says the Swedish description, "expressing the sufferings of his soul over his country's fate."[1]
From Stockholm Kościuszko passed on to Goteborg to await a ship for England. Here too the inhabitants vied with each other to do him honour, and arranged amateur concerts for him in his rooms. On the 16th of May the Poles embarked. After three weeks' passage in a small merchant vessel, they landed at Gravesend, and thence reached London. "Kościuszko, the hero of freedom, is here," announced the Gentleman's Magazine; and indeed the English papers were full of him. He stayed in Leicester Square. The whole of London made haste to visit him. The leading politicians, including Fox, men of letters, among whom we find Sheridan, the beauties of the day and the rulers of fashion, all alike thronged his rooms. To Walter Savage Landor, then a mere youth, the sight of Kościuszko awoke the sympathy for Poland that he never lost, to which English literature owes one of his Imaginary Conversations. More than half a century later he looked back to the moment in which he spoke to Kościuszko as the happiest of his life. The Whig Club presented Kościuszko with a sword of honour. The beautiful Duchess of Devonshire pressed upon him a costly ring, which went the way of most of the gifts that Kościuszko received: he gave them away to friends. All such tokens of admiration had never counted for anything in Kościuszko's life, and now they were the merest baubles to a man who had seen his country fall. In the portrait that, against his wish and without
- ↑ T. Korzon, Kościuszko.
