sonably doubtful whether he should not be turned out some day; looking upon himself only as a lodger, and making the most of his brief tenure of St. James's and Hampton Court; plundering, it is true, somewhat, and dividing amongst his German followers; but what could be expected of a sovereign who at home could sell his subjects at so many ducats per head, and make no scruple in so disposing of them? I fancy a considerable shrewdness, prudence, and even moderation in his ways. The German Protestant was a cheaper, and better, and kinder king than the Catholic Stuart in whose chair he sat, and so far loyal to England, that he let England govern herself. Having these lectures in view, I made it my business to visit that ugly cradle in which our Georges were nursed. The old town of Hanover must look still pretty much as in the time when George Louis left it. The gardens and pavilions of Herrenhausen are scarce changed since the day when the stout old Electress Sophia fell down in her last walk there, preceding but by a few weeks to the tomb James II.'s daughter, whose death made way for the Brunswick Stuarts in England. The two first royal Georges, and their father, Ernest Augustus, had quite royal notions regarding marriage; and Louis XIV. and Charles II. scarce distinguished themselves more at Versailles or St. James's, than these German sultans in their little city on the banks of the Leine. You may see at Herrenhausen the very rustic theatre in which the Platens danced and performed masques, and sang before the Elector and his sons. There are the very fauns and dryads of stone still glimmering through the branches, still grinning and piping their ditties of no tone, as in the days when painted nymphs hung garlands round them; appeared under their leafy arcades with gilt crooks, guiding rams with gilt horns; descended from "machines" in the guise of Diana or Minerva; and delivered immense allegorical compliments to the princes returned home from the campaign. That was a curious state of morals and politics in Europe; a queer-eonsequence of the triumph of the monarchical principle. Feudalism was beaten down. The nobility, in its quarrels with the crown, had pretty well succumbed, and the monarch was all in all. He became almost divine: the proudest and most ancient gentry of the land did menial service for him. Who should carry Louis XIV.'s candle when he went to bed? what prince of the blood should hold the king's shirt when his Most Christian Majesty changed that garment? — the French memoirs of the seventeenth century are full of such details and squabbles. The tradition is not yet extinct in Europe. Any of you who were present, as myriads were, at that splendid pageant, the opening of our Crystal Palace in London, must have seen two noble lords, great officers of the household, with ancient pedigrees, with embroidered coats, and stars on their breasts and wands in their hands, walking backwards for near the space of a mile, while the royal procession made its progress. Shall we wonder shall we be angry. shall we laugh at these old-world ceremonies? View them as you will, according to your mood; and with scorn or with respect, or with anger and sorrow, as your temper leads you. Up goes Gesler's hat upon the pole. Salute that symbol of sovereignty with heartfelt awe; or with a sulky shrug of acquiescence, or with a grinning obeisance; or with a stout rebellious No clap your own beaver down on your pate, and refuse to doff it to that spangled velvet and flaunting feather. I make no comment upon the spectators' behavior; all say is, that Gesler's cap is still up in the market-place of Europe, and not a few folks are still kneeling to it. - Put clumsy, high Dutch statues in place of the marbles of Versailles : Court was composed. There were the princes of the house in the first class; in the second, the single field-marshal of the army (the contingent was 18,000, Pöllnitz says, and the Elector had other 14,000 troops in his pay). Then follow, in due order, the authorities civil and military, the working privy councillors, the generals of cavalry and infantry, in the third class; the high chamberlain, high marshals of the court, high masters of the horse, the major-generals of cavalry and infantry, in the fourth class; down to the majors, the hofjunkers or pages, the secretaries or assessors, of the tenth class, of whom all were noble. faney Herrenhausen waterworks in | Electoral We find the master of the horse had 1,090 thalers of pay; the high chamberlain, 2,000-a thaler being about three shillings of our money. There were two chamberlains, and one for the Princess; five gentlemen of the chamber, and five gentlemen ushers; eleven pages and personages to educate these young noblemen such as a governor, a preceptor, a fecht-meister, or fencing master, and a dancing ditto, this latter with a handsome salary of 400 thalers. There were three body and court physicians, with 800 and 500 thalers; a court barber, 600 thalers; a court organist; two musikanten; four French fiddlers; twelve trumpeters, and a bugler; so that there was plenty of music, profane and pious, in Hanover. There were ten chamber waiters, and twentyfour lackeys in livery; a maïtred'hôtel, and attendants of the kitchen; a French cook; a body cook; ten cooks; six cooks' assistants; two Braten masters, or masters of the roast-(one fancies enormous spits turning slowly, and the honest masters of the roast beladling the dripping); a pastry-baker; a pie-baker; and finally, three scullions, at the modest remuneration of eleven thalers. In the sugar-chamber there were four pastry-cooks (for the ladies, no doubt); seven officers in the wine and beer cellars; four bread-bakers; and five men in the plate-room. | escorting his Highness's coach from cies Hanover to Herrenhausen; or halting, mayhap, at Madame Platen's country house of Monplaisir, which lies half-way between the summerpalace and the Residenz. There were 600 horses in the Serene stables - no less than twenty teams of princely carriage horses, eight to a team; sixteen coachmen; fourteen postilions; nineteen ostlers; thirteen helps, besides smiths, carriage-masters, In the good old times of which I horse-doctors, and other attendants am treating, whilst common men of the stable. The female attendants were driven off by herds, and sold were not so numerous: I grieve to to fight the Emperor's enemies on find but a dozen or fourteen of them the Danube, or to bayonet King about the Electoral premises, and Louis's troops of common men on the only two washerwomen for all the Rhine, noblemen passed from court Court. These functionaries had not to court, seeking service from one so much to do as in the present age. prince or the other, and naturally I own to finding a pleasure in these taking command of the ignoble vulsmall-beer chronicles. I like to peo-gar of soldiery which battled and ple the old world, with its every-day died almost without hope of promofigures and inhabitants - not so tion. Noble adventurers travelled much with heroes fighting immense from court to court in search of embattles and inspiring repulsed battal- ployment; not merely noble males, ions to engage; or statesmen locked but noble females too; and if these up in darkling cabinets and medita- latter were beauties, and obtained the ting ponderous laws or dire conspira- favorable notice of the princes, they as with people occupied with stopped in the courts, became the their every-day work or pleasure: my favorites of their Serene or Royal lord and lady hunting in the forest, Highnesses; and received great sums or dancing in the Court, or bowing of money and splendid diamonds to their Serene Highnesses as they and were promoted to be duchesses, pass in to dinner; John Cook and marchionesses, and the like; and did his procession bringing the meal not fall much in public esteem for the from the kitchen; the jolly butlers manner in which they won their adbearing in the flagons from the vancement. In this way Mdlle. de cellar; the stout coachman driving Querouailles, a beautiful French lady, the ponderous gilt wagon, with eight came to London on a special mission cream-colored horses in housings of of Louis XIV., and was adopted by scarlet velvet and morocco leather; a our grateful country and sovereign, postilion on the leaders, and a pair and figured as Duchess of Portsor a half-dozen of running footmen mouth. In this way the beautiful scudding along by the side of the Aurora of Königsmarck travelling vehicle, with conical caps, long silver- about found favor in the eyes of headed maces, which they poised as Augustus of Saxony, and became the they ran, and splendid jackets laced mother of Marshal Saxe, who gave all over with silver and gold. I us a beating at Fontenoy; and in fancy the citizens' wives and their this manner the lovely sisters Elizadaughters looking out from the bal- beth and Melusina of Meissenbach conies; and the burghers over their (who had actually been driven out of beer and mumm, rising up, cap in Paris, whither they had travelled on hand, as the cavalcade passes through a like errand, by the wise jealousy of the town with torch-bearers, trumpet- the female favorite there in possession) ers blowing their lusty cheeks out, and journeyed to Hanover, and became squadrons of jack-booted lifeguards- favorites of the serene house there men, girt with shining cuirasses, reigning. and bestriding thundering chargers, That beautiful Aurora von Königs marck and her brother are wonderful as types of bygone manners, and strange illustrations of the morals of old days. The Königsmarcks were descended from an ancient noble family of Brandenburg, a branch of which passed into Sweden, where it enriched itself and produced several mighty men of valor. The founder of the race was Hans Christof, a famous warrior and plunderer of the Thirty Years' war. One of Hans's sons, Otto, appeared as ambassador at the court of Louis XIV., and had to make a Swedish speech at his reception before the Most Christian King. Otto was a famous dandy and warrior, but he forgot the speech, and what do you think he did? Far from being disconcerted, he recited a portion of the Swedish Catechism to his Most Christian Majesty and his court, not one of whom understood his lingo with the exception of his own suite, who had to keep their gravity as best they might. A biography of the wife of George I., by Dr. Doran, has lately appeared, and I confess I am astounded at the verdict which that writer has delivered, and at his acquittal of this most unfortunate lady. That she had a cold selfish libertine of a husband no one can doubt; but that the bad husband had a bad wife is equally clear. She was married to her cousin for money or convenience, as all princesses were married. She was most beautiful, lively, witty, accomplished: his brutality outraged her: his silence and coldness chilled her : his cruelty insulted her. No wonder she did not love him. How could love be a part of the compact in such a marriage as that? With this unlucky heart to dispose of, the poor creature bestowed it on Philip of Königsmarck, than whom a greater scamp does not walk the history of the seventeenth century. A hundred and eighty years after the fellow was thrust into his unknown grave, a Swedish professor lights upon a box of letters in the University Library at Upsala, written by Philip and Dorothea to each other, and telling their miserable story. Otto's nephew, Aurora's elder brother, Carl Johann of Königsmarck, a favorite of Charles II., a beauty, a dandy, a warrior, a rascal of more than ordinary mark, escaped but deserved being hanged in England, for the murder of Tom Thynne of Longleat. He had a little brother in London with him at this time :as great a beauty, as great a dandy, as great a villain as his elder. This lad, Philip of Königsmarck, also was implicated in the affair; and perhaps it is a pity he ever brought his pretty neck out of it. He went over to Hanover, and was soon appointed colonel of a regiment of H. E. Highness's dragoons. In early life he had been page in the court of Celle; and it was said that he and the pretty Princess Sophia Dorothea, who by this time was married to her cousin George the Electoral Prince, had been in love with each other as children. Their loves were now to be renewed, not innocently, and to come to a fear-nigsmarck was seen no more. ful end. The bewitching Königsmarck had conquered two female hearts in Hanover. Besides the Electoral Prince's lovely young wife Sophia Dorothea, Philip had inspired a passion in a hideous old court lady, the Countess of Platen. The princess seems to have pursued him with the fidelity of many years. Heaps of letters followed him on his campaigns, and were answered by the daring adventurer. The princess wanted to fly with him; to quit her odious husband at any rate. She besought her parents to receive her back; had a notion of taking refuge in France and going over to the Catholic religion; had absolutely packed her jewels for flight, and very likely arranged its details with her lover, in that last long night's interview, after which Philip of Kö Königsmarck, inflamed with drink - there is scarcely any vice of which, have to deal with her are charmed, according to his own showing, this and-fascinated, and bedevilled. How gentleman was not a practitioner-devotedly Miss Strickland has stood had boasted at a supper at Dresden of his intimacy with the two Hanoverian ladies, not only with the princess, but with another lady powerful in Hanover. The Countess Platen, the old favorite of the Elector, hated the young Electoral Princess. The young lady had a lively wit, and constantly made fun of the old one. The Princess's jokes were conveyed to the old Platen just as our idle words are carried about at this present day and so they both hated each other. : The characters in the tragedy, of which the curtain was now about to fall, are about as dark a set as eye ever rested on. There is the jolly Prince, shrewd, selfish, scheming, loving his cups and his ease (I think his good-humor makes the tragedy but darker); his Princess, who speaks little but observes all; his old painted Jezebel of a mistress; his son, the Electoral Prince, shrewd too, quiet, selfish, not ill-humored, and generally silent, except when goaded into fury by the intolerable tongue of his lovely wife; there is poor Sophia Dorothea, with her coquetry and her wrongs, and her passionate attachment to her scamp of a lover, and her wild imprudences, and her mad artifices, and her insane fidelity, and her furious jealousy regarding her husband (though she loathed and cheated him), and her prodigious falsehoods; and the confidante, of course, into whose hands the letters are slipped; and there is Lothario, finally, than whom, as I have said, one can't imagine a more handsome, wicked, worthless reprobate. How that perverse fidelity of passion pursues the villain! How madly true the woman is, and how astoundingly she lies! She has bewitched two or three persons who have taken her up, and they won't believe in her wrong. Like Mary of Scotland, she finds adherents ready to conspire for her even in history, and people who by Mary's innocence! Are there not scores of ladies in this audience who persist in it too? Innocent! I remember as a boy how a great party persisted in declaring Caroline of Brunswick was a martyred angel. So was Helen of Greece innocent. She never ran away with Paris, the dangerous young Trojan. Menelaus, her husband, ill-used her; and there never was any siege of Troy at all. So was Bluebeard's wife innocent. She never peeped into the closet where the other wives were with their heads off. She never dropped the key, or stained it with blood; and her brothers were quite right in finishing Bluebeard, the cowardly brute! Yes, Caroline of Brunswick was innocent; and Madame Laffarge never poisoned her husband; and Mary of Scotland never blew up hers; and poor Sophia Dorothea was never unfaithful; and Eve never took the apple-it was a cowardly fabrication of the serpent's. George Louis has been held up to execration as a murderous Bluebeard, whereas the Electoral Prince had no share in the transaction in which Philip of Königsmarck was scuffled out of this mortal scene. The Prince was absent when the catastrophe came. The Princess had had a hundred warnings; mild hints from her husband's parents; grim remonstrances from himself-but took no more heed of this advice than such besotted poor wretches do. On the night of Sunday, the 1st of July, 1694, Königsmarck paid a long visit to the Princess, and left her to get ready for flight. Her husband was away at Berlin; her carriages and horses were prepared and ready for the elopement. Meanwhile, the spies of Countess Platen had brought the news to their mistress. She went to Ernest Augustus, and procured from the Elector an order for the arrest of the Swede. On the way by which he was to come, four guards were com |