d, while our
Crown-Prince, in the eclipsed state, is inspected by a Sage in
pipe-clay, and Wilhelmina's wedding is coming on.

Chapter VI. -- WILHELMINA'S WEDDING.

Tuesday, 20th November, 1731, Wilhelmina's wedding-day arrived, after
a brideship of eight months; and that young Lady's troublesome romance,
more happily than might have been expected, did at last wind itself up.
Mamma's unreasonable humors continued, more or less; but these also
must now end. Old wooers and outlooks, "the four or three crowned
heads,"--they lie far over the horizon; faded out of one's very
thoughts, all these. Charles XII., Peter II. are dead; Weissenfels is
not, but might as well be. Prince Fred, not yet wedded elsewhere, is
doing French madrigals in Leicester House; tending forwards the "West
Wickham" set of Politicians, the Pitt-Lyttelton set; stands ill
with Father and Mother, and will not come to much. August the
Dilapidated-Strong is deep in Polish troubles, in Anti-Kaiser politics,
in drinking-bouts;--his great-toe never mended, never will mend. Gone to
the spectral state all these: here, blooming with life in its cheeks,
is the one practical Fact, our good Hereditary Prince of
Baireuth,--privately our fate all along;--which we will welcome
cheerfully; and be thankful to Heaven that we have not died in getting
it decided for us!--

Wedding was of great magnificence; Berlin Palace and all things and
creatures at their brightest: the Brunswick-Beverns here, and other high
Guests; no end of pompous ceremonials, solemnities and splendors,--the
very train of one's gown was "twelve yards long." Eschewing all which,
the reader shall commodiously conceive it all, by two samples we have
picked out for him: one sample of a Person, high Guest present; one of
an Apartment where the sublimities went on.

The Duchess Dowager of Sachsen-Meiningen, who has come to honor us on
this occasion, a very large Lady, verging towards sixty; she is
the person. A living elderly Daughter of the Great Elector himself;
half-sister to the late King, half-aunt to Friedrich Wilhelm; widow now
of her third husband: a singular phenomenon to look upon, for a moment,
through Wilhelmina's satirical spectacles. One of her three husbands,
"Christian Ernst of Baireuth" (Margraf there, while the present Line
was but expectant), had been a kind of Welsh-Uncle to the Prince now
Bridegroom; so that she has a double right to be here. "She had found
the secret of tota