Excerpt from The Last King of Poland and His Contemporaries The present volume aims at presenting a picture of the social, moral and intellectual condition of Polish society at the moment when the Polish State was about to disappear for ever from the map of Europe. The narrative will also, it is hoped, go far to explain how it was that Poland, originally the most chivalrous, high-spirited and promising of Republics, had, by the end of the eighteenth century, become a nuisance to her neighbours, and an obstacle to the development of her own people. The central figure in this sinister yet engrossing tableau of a decadent nation dancing carelessly towards its doom, is naturally the last King of Poland. There are few more pathetic figures in modern history than Stanislaus Poniatowski, whose dazzling vices and barren virtues were so typical of the age in which he lived, that "Age of Enlightenment" which prophesied the Millennium, and precipitated the Revolution. In him we find an idealist whose principles were as lofty as his practice was contemptible; a reformer who meant excellently well, yet invariably sacrificed honour to expediency; a statesman by instinct whose political outlook was always clear, whose conclusions were always correct - but alas! his moral flabbiness had forfeited beforehand the confidence of those whom he could have guided and might have saved. And this Prince Charming, eighteenth-century to the very tips of his fingers, lived in an environment which, judging by outward appearances, might very well have been the later Middle Ages. Anyhow it was more eastern than western. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.