ment set against it. The Treaty of
Wusterhausen was not known; but the fact of some Treaty made or
making, some Imperial negotiation always going on, was too evident; and
Friedrich Wilhelm's partialities to the Kaiser and his Seckendorf could
be a secret nowhere.

Negotiation always going on, we say; for such indeed was the case,--the
Kaiser striving always to be loose again (having excellent reasons,
a secret bargain to the contrary, to wit!) in regard to that
Julich-and-Berg Succession; proposing "substitutes for Julich and Berg;"
and Friedrich Wilhelm refusing to accept any imaginable substitute,
anything but the article itself. So that, I believe, the Treaty of
Wusterhausen was never perfectly ratified, after all; but hung, for so
many years, always on the point of being so. These are the uses of your
purchased Grumkow, and of riding the length of a Terrestrial Equator
keeping a Majesty in company. If, by a Double-Marriage with England,
that intricate web of chicanery had been once fairly slit in two, and
new combinations formed, on a basis not of fast-and-loose, could it have
been of disadvantage to either of the Countries, or to either of their
Kings?--Real and grave causes for agreement we find; real or grave
causes for quarrel none anywhere. But light or imaginary causes, which
became at last effectual, can be enumerated, to the length of three or
four.

CAUSE FIRST: THE HANOVER JOINT-HERITAGES, WHICH ARE NOT IN A LIQUID
STATE.

FIRST, the "Ahlden Heritage" was one cause of disagreement, which
lasted long. The poor Mother of George II. and of Queen Sophie had
left considerable properties; "three million THALERS," that is 900,000
pounds, say some; but all was rather in an unliquid state, not so much
as her Will was to be had. The Will, with a 10,000 pounds or so, was in
the hands of a certain Graf von Bar, one of her confidants in that
sad imprisonment: "money lent him," Busching says, [_Beitrage zur
Lebensgeschichte denkwurdiger Personen_ (Halle, 1783-1789), i. 306, ?
NUSSLER. Some distracted fractions of Business Correspondence with this
Bar, in _Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea, _--unintelligible as usual there.]
"to set up a Wax-Bleachery at Cassel:"--and the said Count von Bar was
off with it, Testamentary Paper and all; gone to the REICHSHOFRATH at
Vienna, supreme Judges, in the Empire, of such matters. Who accordingly
issued him a "Protection," to start with: so that when the Hanover
people attempted t