better, I must say,
than was suspected: not quite so bad in the state of fact as in that
of rumor. Crime enough is in it, sin and folly on both sides; there is
killing too, but NOT assassination (as it turns out); on the whole
there is nothing of atrocity, or nothing that was not accidental,
unavoidable;--and there is a certain greatness of DECORUM on the part
of those Hanover Princes and official gentlemen, a depth of silence,
of polite stoicism, which deserves more praise than it will get in our
times. Enough now of the Konigsmark tragedy; [A considerable dreary mass
of books, pamphlets, lucubrations, false all and of no worth or of less,
have accumulated on this dark subject, during the last hundred and fifty
years; nor has the process yet stopped,--as it now well might. For there
have now two things occurred in regard to it FIRST: In the year 1847,
a Swedish Professor, named Palmblad, groping about for other objects in
the College Library of Lund (which is in the country of the Konigsmark
connections), came upon a Box of Old Letters,--Letters undated, signed
only with initials, and very enigmatic till well searched into,--which
have turned out to be the very Autographs of the Princess and her
Konigsmark; throwing of course a henceforth indisputable light on their
relation. SECOND THING: A cautious exact old gentleman, of diplomatic
habits (understood to be "Count Von Schulenburg-Klosterrode of
Dresden"), has, since that event, unweariedly gone into the whole
matter; and has brayed it everywhere, and pounded it small; sifting,
with sublime patience, not only those Swedish Autographs, but the whole
mass of lying books, pamphlets, hints and notices, old and recent; and
bringing out (truly in an intricate and thrice-wearisome, but for the
first time in an authentic way) what real evidence there is. In which
evidence the facts, or essential fact, lie at last indisputable enough.
His Book, thick Pamphlet rather, is that same _ Herzogin von Ahlden _
(Leipzig, 1852) cited above. The dreary wheelbarrowful of others I had
rather not mention again; but leave Count von Schulenburg to mention and
describe them,--which he does abundantly, so many as had accumulated up
to that date of 1852, to the affliction more or less of sane mankind.]
contemporaneous with Friedrich Wilhelm's stay at Hanover, but not
otherwise much related to him or his doings there.

He got no improvement in breeding, as we intimated; none at all; fought,
on t