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etiquette, the same hours, the same amusements, and, very often, the same cookery.

The great capitals of GermanyVienna itself-are provincial, and one is continually amazed to see the small observances and petty details of village life carried on in a great city. There is the same everlasting recurrence in all conversation to the rank and condition of the interlocutor-the perpetual reference to the authority his station may be supposed to confer upon any statement he makes. There is also a guardedness, born of the old days of police espionage, in every allusion to political events; and there is a selfsatisfied air with all the quaint devices to carry on life, as though Germany were the last new thing in civilisation, instead of being, as she is, in the old flint-lock and brown-barrel stage of existence.

Amongst the jeux innocents which are played by young people, there is one in which, at every recurring multiple of a certain number, the person to whom it falls, instead of declaring the number, cries out "Buz." Thus, if seven be the number, each time that the count arrives at fourteen, twenty-one, twentyeight, and so on, the person must exclaim, "Buz." It has often struck me that the practice of this game would be a great aid to conversation in Germany, where title must never be forgotten, and the game comes to an end if the symbol be omitted. Krähwinckel is then no mere village of Germany; it is Berlin, or Dresden, or Munich, just as much as it is Darmstadt or Erfurt and if life could be only prolonged to the patriarchal period, these would not be such bad places to live in; for though the march of events is slow, the comments upon them are slower, and all action, in consequence, is slowest of all.

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That the peace of Europe should now be troubled by this people, as it is at this moment, seems about the least credible thing in nature.

What stimulant has M. Bismark put into their beer to set them ranting and raving in this fashion? What has provoked the drowsy old rhinoceros to imagine itself a leopard ?

And yet this is the nation which is now about to trouble the world, and, if events do not take a turn most improbable and unlikely, to give Europe the miseries of a great war. M. Bismark has begun to treat the small princes of Germany pretty much as certain landlords in a country we know of are accustomed to deal with tenants who are non-improving. He has said, "Either you have no capital or you will not spend it. In either case, you must go. I'll take the farm into my own hands, and see if I can't do better with it." This is a great shock to Krähwinckel. What is to become of Court Chamberlains and small Privy Councillors and smaller Commanders-in-Chief? What is to be done with Grandducal Stallmeisters, and Upper Grooms and Head Jägers, and the Master of the Mint that coined the little copper money lackered with bismuth? Who is to do the honour of Court ceremonials, and present Noodle to Doodle? Who is to carry the order of the Bear and Bagpipes to the friendly sovereign, who responds by the decoration of the Goose with Three Heads? What is the world to do for all those little unmeaning intrigues and small rogueries in which these small princes passed their lives playing as it were les jeux innocents of politics, and having as good fun as their neighbours who were gambling for high stakes? M. Bismark, it is clear, will have none of them. He is all for "high farming" in statecraft, and will hear of nothing but steammowing and bone-crushing.

We talk of our "Falls of Niagara" in England, with household suffrage and ignorance to replace property and intelligence; but what is it all compared to what the

Germans are doing next door? Bowling down one after another of their old idols, they will have nothing that they have had before. Krähwinckel may well feel horrified, for after all, though progress is a very fine thing, prosperity is worth something too, and these little dull dukedoms had a great deal of that prosperity which consists in contentment and the enjoyment of humble tastes. Life was easy, taxation light. There was no crushing wealth to make poverty more painful, and the little peddling questions that touched them were not above the level of the lowest capacities. But when M. But when M. Bismark began to sing, "Wo ist das Deutsche Vaterland?" there was an end of all this.

There are some people-very advanced Liberals-who look on all these changes with a degree of complacency that is at least suspicious. "GERMANY FOR THE HOHENZOLLERN," which is the legend on Bismark's banner, would scarcely seem very pleasant tidings to men who want freedom of thought and of expression, and who aspire to a Parliamentary system that shall really reflect the nation. What can they mean, therefore, when they vote millions for increased armaments, and cry

God-speed to every measure that strengthens the power of the Crown? Are they really so sanguine as to believe that Bismark is only the pioneer of something greater and wiser, and that a time is coming when Prussia shall be regarded as obsolete, and Berlin itself Krähwinckel? Do they actually think that when the enlargements of the shop are completed they can change the name of the firm, and the inscription be, The German Republic, late Northern Confederation?

Now, next to withholding liberties from a people who are prepared to demand them, there is no greater peril than conferring political privileges on those who do not ask for them. A great part of Southern Germany is in this latter position. They really do not desire to have freedom at the cost of being Prussianised. A few, indeed, among them, see farther into the milestone than their neighbours, and hug themselves with the thought that, when Prussia has won the race, Germany will claim the stakes. "EINHEIT IST FREYHEIT"-"Unity is Liberty," they say; and any one who has watched the German emigrants in the United States can readily believe that there is a strong republican element in the people.

HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF THE REIGN OF GEORGE II.

NO. I. THE QUEEN.

THERE is something in the position of sovereign which seems to develop and call forth the qualities of a woman beyond that of any other occupation. The number of reigning women has no doubt been very limited, but it is curious to note how kindly the feminine mind takes to the trade of ruling whenever the opportunity occurs to it. It is, perhaps, the only branch of mental work in which it has attained a true and satisfactory greatness. The only queen regnant we know of who was nobody was our own placid Queen Anne. Such names as those of Isabella of Castile, of Elizabeth, and Maria Theresa, are very illustrious examples of this fact. The historian cannot regard those princely personages with the condescending approbation which critics in every other branch of science and art extend to women. They are great monarchs, figures that stand fully out against the background of history in the boldest and most forcible lines; and that in very absolute contradiction to all conventional theories. The name at the head of this page is not a historical personage of the first eminence; but it is that of a very remarkable woman, who holds no insignificant rank in the long line of English sovereigns. The period is called the reign of George II.; but so long as her life lasted, it was Caroline who was the Queen. The Guelph family, at least in its beginning, does not furnish us with any very interesting or dramatic group. The first Georges are historical characters only because they cannot help themselves-fate and the Protestant succession having been too many for them. They would without doubt have been more honoured, more respectable, more at their ease in every way,

had the prickly circlet, of which the fifth Harry complained, never been placed upon their homely brows. It was no doubt a painful metamorphosis for the German "Lairdie," the obscure Elector, whom nobody expected to cope with a Grand Monarque, or take up the traditions of an imperial court, to emerge out of his jolly little uncleanly Teutonic paradise, and submit himself to the caustic inspection of Whig wits and Jacobite sneers. It was the greatest sacrifice of comfort to grandeur that has been made in modern times. These royal gentlemen have been weighed in a great many balances of late years, and the result has not been flattering to them, though it has not left them altogether without credit. We do not propose to reopen the record. The little monarch, with "his right leg well forward," and his "eyes à fleur de la tête," and the " dapper George who succeeded him, have had more than their share of discussion. But from the year 1727 to 1737 there was another monarch in England whose name was not George -a woman not unfit to take her place among the reigning princesses. Queen Caroline is even a greater contradiction to every ordinary theory which ordinary men frame about women, than are the other sovereigns who have proved the art of government to be one of the arts within a woman's powers. Every ideal of a good wife which has ever been conceived by man makes out the model woman to be furiously jealous and vindictive over the mere suspicion of infidelity in her husband. Has not some one said that every wife is a Queen Eleanor in her heart?-and it is not only the good woman who is subject to this infirmity. The light-minded, the

careless, even the guilty, show the same ruling passion. She who sins herself is not made indulgent thereby to her partner's iniquity. It is the one fault which no woman forgives. And again, the popular imagination supposes that maternity destroys all power of discrimination in a mother. She may be wounded, injured, insulted by her children; she may see them do everything that is base and miserable; she may watch them sink into the lowest depths of degradation; but she will love and believe in them still. To these two fundamental principles of a woman's nature, there is scarce a creature in Christendom who would not seal his or her adhesion. They lie beyond or above all argument. They are proved, and over again proved, every day.

Queen Caroline gives a dead contradiction to both. She was an admirable wife; but her husband made her the confidante of his amours, and told her about his Rosamonds, and yet she never poi soned, nor thought of poisoning, one of them. She does not even seem to have been jealous. Her historians, moved by the utter impossibility, according to all preconceived notions, of such extraordinary philosophy, pick out here and there the faint little snub bestowed upon "my good Howard," to show that in her heart this instinct of nature existed warmly enough, though in constant control. But the examples do not bear out the suggestion; for it is hard if a lady, not to say a queen, may not snub her bedchamber - woman for her pleasure without any motive. And she despised and disliked her son. We are aware that to say these words is as much as to give her cause over before every domestic tribunal. Monster! does not every one say? Yet Caroline was no monster. She was a woman and a foreigner, and yet she was more actively and urgently Queen of England than any other except

Elizabeth: she was a wife, and yet she varied the form of conjugal wickedness by almost encouraging her husband in his infidelities: she was a mother, yet gave up, despised, and opposed her son. For the first of her contradictory qualities, that of power, she sins in company with other illustrious exceptions to the common theory; but in her other faults she stands alone, or almost alone.

It is a difficult task to apologise for or explain such wonderful incongruities. They contradict at once the conclusions of experience and those certainties which are intuitive and above discussion. If a woman in fiction had been created with such failings, even had she been the highest heroine of tragedy, she would have been flouted

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an impossible creature. She would be false to nature. real woman is very true in fact, and takes no heed about being true to nature. It is the one great advantage which fact has over invention, and the historic over every other Muse. There are no unities, no consistencies, no rule of probability, to bind the free current of real life. What a poet dare not dream of, existence produces calmly, contradicting its own laws, setting aside the very principles on which its continuance and stability are founded. But the character in which such extraordinary contradictions exist cannot be a simple or superficial one. And the office of the historical student is not to defend, notwithstanding the general rage for rehabilitation, which has changed or attempted to change so many of our landmarks, but only to record, and if possible to explain.

Caroline was born the daughter of a Duke of Anspach, one of the cluster of little German houses to which, for so many generations, we have owed our royal wives and husbands. She was brought up under the care of a princess of the house of Brunswick, the mother of Frederick the Great, and the daughter of

the old Electress Sophia, of a stock to all appearance both sweeter and stronger in its feminine branches than it has ever been in its men. The first event in her life is as contradictory at the first glance to all its future tenor, as the strange qualities which distinguished her in after life are contradictory to her womanhood. It is said that she was chosen by the King of Spain as his bride, under condition of abandoning the Protestant faith and becoming a Catholic. Such a change was (and indeed we suspect is) no such dreadful matter in the German matrimonial market, where princesses are trained to bless the world. And Caroline, far from being a bigot, or disposed to exaggerate the importance of religious distinctions, shows few symptoms of any religious conviction what ever. She refused, however, this advantageous bargain. Her faith, such as it was, seems to have been more to her than the unlucky but then splendid crown which was laid at her feet. "She could not be prevailed on to buy a crown at so dear a rate," says Bishop Burnet. Perhaps at that early period of her existence some lingerings of childish devoutness might be in the mind of the young princess; but there can have been very little piety round her, and she showed small sign of any in her after life. The real cause of her resistance probably was that her mind, though not religious, was essentially Protestant, as a great many minds are, especially in Germany. The Protestant mind still exists and flourishes, though not always in distinct connection with a Protestant faith; and is a far less conquerable thing than any system of doctrine. In such a constitution, a determined dislike to submit to authority, to bind the spirit down to obedience, or even to profess subjection in matters with which the intellect has so much to do, is infinitely stronger than the faculty of belief. Caroline, we suspect, would have

been very vague in any confession of her faith; but it is easy to perceive how difficult the profession of Catholicism would be to a woman of such a character and mind.

"Her pious firmness," adds the bishop-historian, "is likely to be rewarded even in this life with a much better crown than that which she rejected."

It was to make Great Britain happy, as all the poets twittered, that the choice was made; and she married her George shortly after, and lived with him, in the most singular version of married life perhaps ever set before the world, for more than thirty years. To judge it or her by the rules current among ourselves at the present day would be both unjust and foolish; but happily the chroniclers of the time have left us in little doubt about the manners and customs of that babbling and talkative age. It is painful to think how little of the same kind of pleasure our descendants, a hundred years hence, will get out of us. Thanks to Sir Rowland Hill (and many thanks to him), we, as a nation, write letters no more. And somehow, notwithstanding the contradiction which statistics would throw in our face did we venture on such an assertion, there do not seem to be so many of us afloat in the world nowadays as there were in the period when Horace Walpole corresponded with his friends. There is no such hum as of a crowd breathing out of the mingled mass of society where fashion and politics rival and aid each other. In the days of the great Horace the buzz filled the air; quiet people heard it miles off, counties off; now a great bourdonnement, filling their ears like the sound of the waves of life in the City when you stand within the silent aisles of St Paul's, and listen -now scraps of distinct talk, like those you catch by intervals on the skirts of every assembly-now an opening of the crowd as some one comes or goes—now a gathering of

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