he vulpine parts of which, he has
a turn. He writes and speaks articulate grammatical French; but neither
in that, nor in native Pommerish Platt-Deutsch, does he show us much,
except the depths of his own greed, of his own astucities and stealthy
audacities. Of which we shall hear more than enough by and by.

OF THE DESSAUER, NOT YET "OLD."

As to the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, rugged man, whose very face is the
color of gunpowder, he also knows French, and can even write in it, if
he like,--having duly had a Tutor of that nation, and strange adventures
with him on the grand tour and elsewhere;--but does not much practise
writing, when it can be helped. His children, I have heard, he expressly
did not teach to read or write, seeing no benefit in that effeminate
art, but left them to pick it up as they could. His Princess, all
rightly ennobled now,--whom he would not but marry, though sent on the
grand tour to avoid it,--was the daughter of one Fos an Apothecary at
Dessau; and is still a beautiful and prudent kind of woman, who seems
to suit him well enough, no worse than if she had been born a Princess.
Much talk has been of her, in princely and other circles; nor is his
marriage the only strange thing Leopold has done. He is a man to keep
the world's tongue wagging, not too musically always; though himself
of very unvocal nature. Perhaps the biggest mass of inarticulate human
vitality, certainly one of the biggest, then going about in the world. A
man of vast dumb faculty; dumb, but fertile, deep; no end of ingenuities
in the rough head of him:--as much mother-wit, there, I often guess, as
could be found in whole talking parliaments, spouting themselves away in
vocables and eloquent wind!

A man of dreadful impetuosity withal. Set upon his will as the one
law of Nature; storming forward with incontrollable violence: a very
whirlwind of a man. He was left a minor; his Mother guardian. Nothing
could prevent him from marrying this Fos the Apothecary's Daughter; no
tears nor contrivances of his Mother, whom he much loved, and who took
skilful measures. Fourteen months of travel in Italy; grand tour, with
eligible French Tutor,--whom he once drew sword upon, getting some
rebuke from him one night in Venice, and would have killed, had not the
man been nimble, at once dexterous and sublime:--it availed not. The
first thing he did, on re-entering Dessau, with his Tutor, was to call
at Apothecary Fos's, and see the charmi