f her rank and station, before her title as
future queen was ever questioned or menaced.

Her Diary finishes with her last night in the Dresden palace. We do not
hear so much as the clatter of the carriage wheels that carried her and
"Richard" to her unfrocking as princess of the blood,--in short, our
narrator is not prejudiced, on the defensive, or soured by
disfranchisement. She had no axes to grind while writing; for her all
kings dropped out of the clouds; the lustre that surrounds a king never
dimmed while her Diary was in progress, and before she ceases talking to
us she never "ate of the fish that hath fed of that worm that hath eat
of a king."

Yet this large folio edition of _obscenites royale_, chock full, at the
same time, of intensely human and interesting facts, notable and amusing
things, as enthralling as a novel by Balzac,--Louise's life record in
sum and substance, since her carryings-on _after_ she doffed her royal
robes for the motley of the free woman are of no historical, and but
scant human interest.

The prodigality of the mass of indictments Louise launches against
royalty as every-day occurrences, reminds one of the great Catharine
Sforza, Duchess of Milan's clever _mot_. When the enemy captured her
children she merely said, "I retain the oven for more."

_Royal Scandals_

Such scandalmongering! Only Her Imperial Highness doesn't see the
obloquy,--sarcasm, cynicism and disparagement being royalty's every-day
diet.

Such gossiping! But what else was there to do at a court whose
literature is tracts and whose theatre of action the drill grounds.

But for all that, Louise's Diary is history, because its minute things
loom big in connection with social and political results, even as its
horrors and abnormalities help paint court life and the lives of kings
and princes as they _are_, not as royalties' sycophants and apologizers
would have us view them.

There is a perfect downpour of books eulogizing monarchs and monarchy;
royal governments spend millions of the people's money to uphold and
aggrandize exalted kingship and seedy princeship alike; three-fourths of
the press of Europe is swayed by king-worship, or subsidized to sing the
praises of "God's Anointed," while in our own country the aping of
monarchical institutions, the admiration for court life, the
idealization of kings, their sayings, doings and pretended superiority,
as carried on by the multi-rich, are undermining love for t