er had been smashed by a
cannon-ball, and who was carried by the soldiers on crossed poles--going
with them, and the Russians neglecting to pursue. In this manner they
reached their former camp."--_Charles XII._, by Oscar Browning, 1899,
pp. 213, 220, 224, sq. For an account of his flight southwards into
Turkish territory, _vide post_, p. 233, note 1. The bivouack "under a
savage tree" must have taken place on the night of the battle, at the
first halt, between Poltava and the junction of the Vorskla and
Dnieper.]

[251] {208}[Compare--

"Thus elms and thus the savage cherry grows."

Dryden's _Georgics_, ii. 24.]

[252] {209}[For some interesting particulars concerning the Hetman
Mazeppa, see Barrow's _Memoir of the Life of Peter the Great_, 1832, pp.
181-202.]

[253] {211}[The Dnieper.]

[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 [Bogdan Khmelnitzky]
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 Khmelnitzky'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 Khmelnitzky'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 t