iuszko's standing
was now for the first time to be publicly recognized by the Government
of his country, and his talent impressed into her service. His old love,
the Princess Lubomirska, here reappears in his history, writing a letter
to the King, with the request that Kosciuszko should be given a military
command. If to the modern reader it comes with something of a shock, as
Korzon remarks, that a woman considered her intervention needed to push
the claims of a soldier who had so greatly distinguished himself, we
must remember that Kosciuszko was then scarcely known in Poland. His
service had been foreign; he belonged to a quiet country family that had
nothing to do with affairs of state. Apart from the Princess's
propaganda, of which we hear nothing further, Kosciuszko's name was sent
up for recommendation to the Grand Diet, and the Lithuanian magnate who
proposed it spoke before the Diet of Kosciuszko as a man "who possesses
high personal qualities, and, as he learnt to shed his blood for a
foreign country, will assuredly not grudge it to his own." Kosciuszko
was present; and as he heard these words he politely rose and bowed.
Kosciuszko was no frequenter of courts or lover of palaces; but his
interests obliged him to present himself to the King, who remembered him
as the promising youth to whom his favour had been given when a cadet.
The upshot of all this was that he received the commission of
major-general in the Polish army on the 1st of October, 1789.

His first command was in the country districts of Great Poland, close to
the frontiers of that part of Poland which since the first partition had
been under Prussian dominion. It was a keen disappointment to Kosciuszko
that his appointment was in the army of Poland proper, the so-called
Crown army, instead of in that of his native Lithuania. That wild and
romantic land of marsh and forest which the poetry of her great singer,
Adam Mickiewicz, has made live for ever in Polish literature, casts a
spell as it were of enchantment over her born sons; and Kosciuszko felt
himself a stranger among the less simple and more sophisticated men with
whom he was now thrown.

While busy training soldiers his thoughts turned often to his little
estate which he had placed in the charge of his sister.

"See that the Dutch cheeses are made," he writes to her. "Please put in
the grafts given me by Laskowski, and in those places where the former
ones have not taken. To-morrow sow b