ord
of honor for the rest. England is now out of his head;--all romance
is too sorrowfully swept out: and instead of the "sacred air-cities of
hope" in this high section of his history, the young man is looking into
the "mean clay hamlets of reality," with an eye well recognizing them
for real. With an eye and heart already tempered to the due hardness for
them. Not a fortunate result, though it was an inevitable one. We
saw him flirting with the beautiful wedded Wreech; talking to
Lieutenant-General Schulenburg about marriage, in a way which shook the
pipe-clay of that virtuous man. He knows he would not get his choice,
if he had one; strives not to care. Nor does he, in fact, much care; the
romance being all out of it. He looks mainly to outward advantages; to
personal appearance, temper, good manners; to "religious principle,"
sometimes rather in the reverse way (fearing an OVERPLUS rather);--but
always to likelihood of moneys by the match, as a very direct item.
Ready command of money, he feels, will be extremely desirable in a Wife;
desirable and almost indispensable, in present straitened circumstances.
These are the notions of this ill-situated Coelebs.

The parties proposed first and last, and rumored of in Newspapers and
the idle brains of men, have been very many,--no limit to their numbers;
it MAY be anybody: an intending purchaser, though but possessed
of sixpence, is in a sense proprietor of the whole Fair! Through
Schulenburg we heard his own account of them, last Autumn;--but the
far noblest of the lot was hardly glanced at, or not at all, on that
occasion. The Kaiser's eldest Daughter, sole heiress of Austria and
these vast Pragmatic-Sanction operations; Archduchess Maria Theresa
herself,--it is affirmed to have been Prince Eugene's often-expressed
wish, That the Crown-Prince of Prussia should wed the future Empress
[Hormayr, _Allgemeine Geschichte der neueslen Zeit_ (Wien, 1817),
i. 13; cited in Preuss, i. 71.] Which would indeed have saved immense
confusions to mankind! Nay she alone of Princesses, beautiful,
magnanimous, brave, was the mate for such a Prince,--had the Good
Fairies been consulted, which seldom happens:--and Romance itself might
have become Reality in that case: with high results to the very soul
of this young Prince! Wishes are free: and wise Eugene will have been
heard, perhaps often, to express this wish; but that must have been all.
Alas, the preliminaries, political, especially rel