Plenty of new
children come, to divide our regard withal, and more are coming; five
new Princesses, wise little Ulrique the youngest of them (named of
Sweden and the happy Swedish Treaty), whom we love much for her grave
staid ways. Nay, next after Ulrique comes even a new Prince; August
Wilhelm, ten years younger than Friedrich; and is growing up much more
according to the paternal heart. Pretty children, all of them, more or
less; and towardly, and comfortable to a Father;--and the worst of them
a paragon of beauty, in comparison to perverse, clandestine, disobedient
Fritz, with his French fopperies, flutings, and cockatoo fashions of
hair!--

And so the silent divulsion, silent on Fritz's part, exploding loud
enough now and then on his Father's part, goes steadily on, splitting
ever wider; new offences ever superadding themselves. Till, at last,
the rugged Father has grown to hate the son; and longs, with sorrowful
indignation, that it were possible to make August Wilhelm Crown-Prince
in his stead. This Fritz ought to fashion himself according to his
Father's pattern, a well-meant honest pattern; and he does not! Alas,
your Majesty, it cannot be. It is the new generation come; which cannot
live quite as the old one did. A perennial controversy in human life;
coeval with the genealogies of men. This little Boy should have been the
excellent paternal Majesty's exact counterpart; resembling him at all
points, "as a little sixpence does a big half-crown:" but we perceive
he cannot. This is a new coin, with a stamp of its own. A surprising
FRIEDRICH D'OR this; and may prove a good piece yet; but will never be
the half-crown your Majesty requires!--

Conceive a rugged thick-sided Squire Western, of supreme degree,--or
this Squire Western is a hot Hohenzollern, and wears a crown
royal;--conceive such a burly NE-PLUS-ULTRA of a Squire, with his
broad-based rectitudes and surly irrefragabilities; the honest German
instincts of the man, convictions certain as the Fates, but capable of
no utterance, or next to none, in words; and that he produces a Son
who takes into Voltairism, piping, fiddling and belles-lettres,
with apparently a total contempt for Grumkow and the giant-regiment!
Sulphurous rage, in gusts or in lasting tempests, rising from a fund of
just implacability, is inevitable. Such as we shall see.

The Mother, as mothers will, secretly favors Fritz; anxious to screen
him in the day of high-wind. Withal she has p