arker, Sumner, Felton, and
Everett,--the last named of whom was then President of Harvard
University. The eccentric appearance and character of the Count, of
course, excited curiosity and gave rise to many idle rumors, the most
popular of which declared him to be a Russian spy, though what there was
to spy in this country, where everything is published in the newspapers,
or what the Czar expected to learn from such an agent, nobody undertook
to explain. The phrase was a convenient one, and, like many others
equally senseless, was currently adopted because it seemed to explain
the incomprehensible; and certainly, to the multitude, no man was ever
less intelligible than Gurowski.

To those, however, who cared for precise information, the French and
German periodicals of the day, in which his name frequently figured,
furnished sufficient to determine his social and historical status. From
authentic sources it was soon learned that he was the head of a
distinguished noble family of Poland; that he was born in 1805, and had
taken part in the great insurrection of 1831 against the Russians, for
which he had been condemned to death, while his estates were confiscated
and assigned to a younger brother, who had remained loyal to the Czar.
It was known also that at Paris, where he had found refuge, he had been
a special favorite of Lafayette and of the leading republicans, and an
active member of the Polish Revolutionary Committee, till, in 1835, he
published _La Verite sur la Russie_, in which work he maintained that
the interests of Poland and of all the other Slavic countries would be
promoted by absorption into the Russian Empire and union under the
Russian Czar. This book drew upon him the indignant denunciation of his
countrymen, who regarded it as a betrayal of their cause, and led to the
revocation of his sentence of death, and to an invitation to enter the
service of Nicholas. He accordingly went to St. Petersburg in 1836,
where his sister had long resided, personally attached to the Empress
and in high favor at the imperial court. He was employed at first in the
private chancery of the Emperor, and afterwards in the Department of
Public Instruction, in which he suggested and introduced various
measures tending to Russianize Poland by means of schools and other
public institutions. He seems for some years to have been in favor, and
on the high road to power and distinction. In 1844, however, he fled
from St. Petersburg s