a.

[Sidenote: Revolt of Cracow]

[Sidenote: Anarchy in Austrian-Poland]

[Sidenote: Cracow incorporated in Austria]

[Sidenote: Tennyson on Poland]

For the time being the Austrian Government was too preoccupied with its
troubles at home to carry its Italian policy to extremes. The Polish
refugees at Paris had long determined to strike another blow for the
freedom of their country. It was arranged that the Polish provinces in
Austria and Prussia should rise and revolt, early during this year, and
extend the revolution to Russian Poland. But the Prussian Government
crushed the conspiracy before a blow was struck. In Austria the attempt was
more successful. Late in February insurrection broke out in the free city
of Cracow. General Collin occupied the city, but his forces proved too
weak. The Polish nobles around Tarnow in Northern Galicia raised the
standard of revolt. Some 40,000 Polish insurgents marched on Cracow. A
severe reverse was inflicted upon them by the government troops. Now the
peasants turned against the nobles, burning down the largest estates and
plunging the country into anarchy. The landowners, face to face with the
humiliating fact that their own tenants were their bitterest foes, charged
the Austrian Government with having instigated a communistic revolt. In a
circular note to the European courts, Metternich protested that the
outbreak of the Polish peasantry was purely spontaneous. A simultaneous
attempt at revolution in Silesia was ruthlessly put down. Austria, Russia
and Prussia now revoked the treaty of Vienna in regard to Poland. Cracow,
which had been recognized as an independent republic, was annexed by
Austria with the consent of Russia and Prussia, and against the protests of
England, France and Sweden. New measures of repression against Polish
national aspirations were taken in Russia. The last traces of Poland were
blotted from the map of nations. It was then that Tennyson wrote his famous
sonnet on Poland:

"How long, O God, shall men be ridden down,
And trampled under by the last and least
Of men? The heart of Poland hath not ceased
To quiver, tho' her sacred blood doth drown
The fields, and out of every smouldering town
Cries to Thee, lest brute Power be increased."

In Russia during this year Otto von Kotzebue, the great navigator and
Arctic explorer, died in his fifty-ninth year.

[Sidenote: Civil war in Portugal]

Almost simultaneously with the attempted revol