Note 284 — THE AGE OF BRONZE.

{551} [Napoleon promised much, but did little for the Poles. "In speaking of the business of Poland he ... said it was a whim (c'était un caprice)."—Narrative of an Embassy to Warsaw, by M. Dufour de Pradt, 1816, p. 51. "The Polish question," says Lord Wolseley (Decline and Fall of Napoleon, 1893, p. 19), "thrust itself most inconveniently before him. In early life all his sympathies ... were with the Poles, and he had regarded the partition of their country as a crime.... As a very young man liberty was his only religion; but he had now learned to hate and to fear that term.... He had no desire ... to be the Don Quixote of Poland by reconstituting it as a kingdom. To fight Russia by the re-establishment of Polish independence was not, therefore, to be thought of."]