wards tried for desertion, before a court-martial composed of twelve officers-two were for sparing the life of the prince, but all the rest were base enough to gratify the sanguinary insanity of their master by condemning them both to death. All Germany, however, exclaimed loudly against this sentence; and made such representations to the king, that he was at last prevailed on to spare his son. But the unhappy Katt was sacrificed. His scaffold was erected immediately before the window of his unhappy master, who was dressed by force in the same funeral garment with his friend, and was held up at the window by two soldiers, while the executioner struck off the head of his companion. There is no record of such brutal barbarity in the history of Nero or Domitian.

After this, the family feuds about his daughter's marriage revive with double fury. The queen, whose whole heart is set on the English alliance, continues her petty intrigues to effect that object; while the king, rendered furious by the haughty language adopted by the English ministry on the subject of the insult offered to their ambassador, determines to have her married without a moment's delay; and after threatening the queen with his cane, sends to offer her the hand of the Prince of Bareith; which she dutifully accepts, in spite of the bitter lamentations and outrageous fury of the queen. That intriguing princess, however, does not cease to intrigue though deserted by her daughter-but sends again in greater urgency than ever to England;-and that court, if we are to believe the statement before us, at last, seriously afraid of losing a match every way desirable, sends off despatches, containing an entire and unqualified acquiescence in all Frederic's stipulations as to the marriage-which arrive at Berlin the very morning of the day on which the princess was to be solemnly betrothed to M. de Bareith, but are wickedly kept back by Grumkow and the imperial envoy, till after the ceremony had been publicly and irrevocably completed. Their disclosure then throws all parties into rage and despair; and the intriguers are made the ridiculous victims of their own baseness and duplicity. The indefatigable queen, however, does not despair even yet; but sends off another courier to England, and sets all her emissaries to prepare the king to break off the match in the event of the answer being favourable; nay, the very night before the marriage, she takes her daughter apart, and begs her to live with her husband as a sister with a brother for a few days, till the result of the embassage is known. But her usual destiny pursues her. The fatal evening arrives; and the princess, with a train forty-five feet in length, and the spousal crown placed on

twenty-four twisted locks of false hair, each thicker than her arm, enters the grand saloon, and takes the irrevocable vow; --and her mother has just put her to bed when she hears that her courier has arrived, and leaves her in rage and anguish.

The humours of the rest of the family appear to no great advantage during the bridal festivities. In the first place, the princess's sister, Charlotte, falls in love with the bridegroom, and does her possible to seduce him. Then old Frederic cheats the bride in her settlements, which amount to a gross sum of near 500l. a year;-and, finally, her brother-in-law, the Margrave of Anspach, rallies her husband so rudely upon his mother's gallantries, that the latter gives him a brave defiance in face of the whole court; at which the poor margrave is so dreadfully frightened, that he bursts out into screams and tears, and runs for refuge into the queen's apartment, where he hides himself behind the arras, from which he is taken in a filthy condition, and carried to his apartments, "où il exhala sa colere par des vomissemens et un diarrhée qui pensa l'envoyer à l'autre monde."-Yet the good princess assures us that this reptile had "a good heart and a good understanding" with no fault but being a little passionate; and then, in the very next page, she records a malignant and detected falsehood which he had vented against her husband, and which rendered him odious in the eyes of the whole court. Being dissatisfied with her settlements, she puts the king in good humour by giving a grand dinner to him and his officers, at which they are all "ivres morts;" but having mentioned her distresses through the queen, he is so much moved with them, that he calls for the settlements, and strikes off about one fourth of her allowance.

All this happened in autumn, 1731; and in January, 1732, the princess being far advanced in pregnancy, and the roads almost impassable, it was thought advisable for her to set out for her husband's court at Bareith. She is overturned of course several times, and obliged to walk half the way :-but we pass over the disasters of the journey, to commemorate her arrival in this ancient principality. The first village she reached was Hoff, which is on the frontier-and has also the convenience of being within three miles of the centre of the territory and here the grand marshal, and all the nobility of the province are mustered to receive her at the bottom of the staircase, or, in other words, of the wooden ladder which led to her apartments. However, various guns were fired off very successfully, and the chief nobility were invited to din

ner. The princess's description of these personages is really very edifying. They had all faces, she says, which a child could not look on without screaming;-huge masses of hair on their heads, filled with a race of vermin as ancient as their pedigrees;-clothed in old laced suits that had descended through many generations, the most part in rags, and no way fitting their present wearers ;-the greater part of them covered with itch; and their conversation, of oxen. Immediately after dinner they began with the princess's health in a huge bumper, and proceeded regularly in the same gallant manner through the whole of her genealogy; so that in less than half an hour she found herself in the middle of thirty-four monsters, so drunk that none of them could articulate "et rendant les boyaux à tous ces desastreux visages." Next day being Sunday, there was a sermon in honour of the occasion, in which the preacher gave an exact account of all the marriages that had happened in the world from the days of Adam down to the last of the patriarchs-illustrated with so many circumstantial details as to the antecedents and consequents in each, that the male part of his audience laughed outright, and the female pretended to blush throughout the whole discourse. The dinner scene was the same as on the day preceding; with the addition of the female nobility who came in the evening, with their heads enveloped in greasy wigs like swallows' nests, and ancient embroidered dresses, stuck all over with knots of faded ribands.

The day following, the margrave, her father-in-law, came himself to meet her. This worthy prince was nearly as amiable, and not quite so wise, as the king she had left. He had read but two books in the world, Telemaque, and Amelot's Roman history, and discoursed out of them so yery tediously, that the poor princess fainted from mere ennui, at the very first interview; then he drank night and day-and occasionally took his cane to the prince his son and his other favourites. Though living in poverty and absolute discomfort, he gave himself airs of the utmost magnificence-went to dinner with three flourishes of cracked trumpets-received his court, leaning with one hand on a table, in imitation of the emperorand conferred his little dignities in harangues so pompous, and so awkwardly delivered, that his daughter-in-law at once laughed and was ashamed of him. He was awkward, too, and embarrassed in the society of strangers of good breeding, but made amends by chattering without end about himself and his two books to those who were bound to bear with him. Under the escort of this great potentate the princess made her triumphal entry into the city of Bareith the next morning.

ture.

The whole procession consisted of one coach containing the constituted authorities who had come out to meet her, her own carriage drawn by six carrion post-horses, that containing her attendants, and six or seven wagons loaded with furniThe margrave then conducted her from the palace gate in great state to her apartments, through a long passage, hung with cobwebs, and so abominably filthy, as to turn her stomach in hurrying through it. This opened into an antechamber, adorned with old tapestry so torn and faded, that the figures on it looked like so many ghosts; and through that into a cabinet furnished with green damask all in tatters. Her bedchamber was also furnished with the same stuff-but in such a condition, that the curtains fell in pieces whenever they were touched. Half of the windows were broken; and there was no fire though it was midwinter. The dinners were not eatable; and lasted three hours, with thirty flourishes of the old trumpets for the bumper toasts with which they were enlivened: add to all this, that the poor princess was very much indisposed-that the margrave came and talked to her out of Telemaque and Amelot five or six hours every day and that she could not muster cash enough to buy herself a gown; and it will not appear wonderful, that in the very midst of the wedding revelries, she spent half her time in bed, weeping over the vanity of human grandeur.

By and by, however, she found occupation in quarrelling with her sisters-in-law, and in making and appeasing disputes between her husband and his father. She agrees so ill, indeed, with all the family, that her proposal of returning to lie in at Berlin is received with great joy:-but while they are deliberating about raising money for this journey of 200 miles, she becomes too ill to move. Her sister of Anspach, and her husband, come, and quarrel with her upon points of etiquette; the margrave falls in love with one of her attendants; and in the midst of all manner of perplexities she is delivered of a daughter. The margrave, who was in the country, not hearing the cannon which proclaimed this great event, conceives that he is treated with great disrespect, and gives orders for having his son imprisoned in one of his fortresses. He relents, however, at the christening, and is put in good humour by a visit from another son and a brother-the first of whom is described as a kind of dwarf and natural fool, who could never take seriously to any employment but catching flies; and the other as a furious madman, in whose company no one was sure of his life. This amiable family party is broken up by an order on the princess's husband to join his regiment at Berlin, and another order from her father for her to pay a

visit to her sister at Anspach. On her way she visits an ancient beauty, with a nose like a beet-root, and two maids of honour so excessively fat that they could not sit down; and, in stooping to kiss the princess's hand, fell over, and rolled like balls of flesh on the carpet. At Anspach she finds the margrave deep in an intrigue with the housemaid, and consoles her sister under this affliction. She then makes a great effort, and raises money enough to carry her to Berlin; where she is received with coldness and ridicule by the queen, and neglect and insult by all her sisters. Her brother's marriage with the Princess of Brunswick was just about to take place, and we choose to give, in her own words, her account of the manner in which she was talked over in this royal circle,

"La reine, à table, fit tomber la conversation sur la princesse royale future. Votre frère,' me dit-elle en le regardant,'est au désespoir de l'épouser, et n'a pas tort: c'est une vrai bête; elle répond à tout ce qu'on lui dit par un oui et un non, accompagné d'un rire niais qui fait mal au cœur. Oh! dit ma sœur Charlotte, votre majesté ne connôit pas encore tout son mérite. J'ai été un matin à sa toilette; j'ai cru y suffoquer; elle exhaloit une odeur insupportable; je crois qu'elle a pour le moins dix ou douze fistules, car cela n'est pas naturel. J'ai remarqué aussi qu'elle est contrefaite; son corps de jupe est rembourré d'un côté, et elle a une hanche plus haute que l'autre.' Je fus fort étonnée de ces propos, qui se tenoient en présence des domestiques et surtout de mon frère. Je m'aperçus qu'ils lui faisoient de la peine et qu'il changeoit de couleur. Il se retira aussitôt après souper. J'en fis autant. Il vint me voir un moment après. Je lui demandai s'il· étoit satisfait du roi? Il me répondit que sa situation changeoit à tout moment; que tantôt il étoit en faveur et tantôt en disgrâce; que son plus grand bonheur consistoit dans l'absence; qu'il menoit une vie douce et tranquille à son régiment; que l'étude et la musique y faisoient ses principales occupations; qu'il avoit fait bâtir une maison et fait faire une jardin charmant où il pouvoit lire et se promener. Je le priai de me dire si le portrait que la reine et ma sœur m'avoient faite de la princesse de Brunswick étoit véritable? 'Nous sommes seuls, repartit-il, et je n'ai rien de caché pour vous, je vous parlerai avec sincérité. La reine, par ses misérables intrigues, est la seule source de nos malheurs. A peine avez-vous été partie qu'elle a renoue avec l'Angleterre; elle a voulu vous substituer ma sœur Charlotte et lui faire épouser le prince de Galles. Vous jugez bien qu'elle a employé tous ses efforts pour faire réussir son plan et pour me marier avec la princesse Amélie. Le roi a été informé de ce dessein aussitôt qu'il a été tramé, la Ramen (qui est plus en grace que jamais auprès d'elle) l'en ayant averti. Ce prince a été piqué au vif de ces nouvelles menées qui ont causé maintes brouilleries entre la reine et Jui. Sekendorff s'en est enfin mélé, et a conseillé au roi de mettre VOL. I. New Series.

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