628 Anecdotes of German Courts. [JuNE, 



the Princess and the ladies of her train was sublime ; it was the wrath of 

 Juno ! 



Flectere si nee non superos Acheronta movebo. 



The only cafd in the little capital was crowded with politicians. A 

 general war was deemed inevitable ; an alliance with Austria, and 

 above all, a subsidy from England was the obvious policy of the state. 

 Every horse in the Prince's stables was impressed into the service of the 

 estafette. At the expiration of a week, murmurs of discontent began to 

 be heard -, an alarming deficiency in the revenue, caused by the enormous 

 consumption of stationary in the department of foreign affairs, was fore- 

 told, and a few fierce spirits pronounced the word republic ! What would 

 have been the result heaven only knows, had not his Prussian Majesty 

 made due reparation to the wounded honour of his Highness of Bentheim 

 Steinfurth an event which was celebrated at court by a grand f4te. 



" My conge was expired, and I returned to Breda. A few years after- 

 wards I met this ex-sovereign Prince in Paris, where he was living upon 

 a pension from the French government, his principality having been 

 converted into a parochial arrondissement of the newly formed kingdom 

 of Westphalia." 



I was highly amused with these anecdotes, which were rendered more 

 piquant by the Baron's art de raconter, a talent he possessed to a degree 

 that would have pleased the fastidious taste of Louis Quatorze himself. 



It is these political territorial divisions that are the curse of Germany. 

 Among her children we see much to admire, a depth of thought a love 

 of science a martial independence of character that elevates the personal 

 dignity of man ; but we nowhere find the virtues of the citizen their 

 love of fatherland is not a political aspiration, and in fact how should it 

 be so a German but seldom dies the subject of the prince under whose 

 dominion he first drew breath ; he may have been born a Prussian, lived 

 an Austrian, and died a Bavarian. Or it may have been his worse fate 

 to have been the subject of some petty independent prince, to support 

 whose beggarly pride, and aristocratic, nay autocratic pretensions, his 

 industry, his energies, his manly pride, have been borne to the earth. 



But a change is fast coming over this state of things, the vibrations of 

 the political substratum have already foretold the coming earthquake ; one, 

 if we are not mistaken, that will not stay its fury until it has swept from 

 the face of the land the race of pigmy despots, who have so long dis- 

 graced it with their tyranny and oppression. 



