he contrary, with his young Cousin (afterwards our George II.), a
boy twice his age, though of weaker bone; and gave him a bloody nose. To
the scandal and consternation of the French Protestant gentlewomen and
court-dames in their stiff silks: "Ahee, your Electoral Highness!" This
had been a rough unruly boy from the first discovery of him. At a very
early stage, he, one morning while the nurses were dressing him, took to
investigating one of his shoe buckles; would, in spite of remonstrances,
slobber it about in his mouth; and at length swallowed it down,--beyond
mistake; and the whole world cannot get it up! Whereupon, wild wail of
nurses; and his "Mother came screaming," poor mother:--It is the same
small shoe-buckle which is still shown, with a ticket and date to it,
"31 December, 1692," in the Berlin _ Kunstkammer _; for it turned out
harmless, after all the screaming; and a few grains of rhubarb
restored it safely to the light of day; henceforth a thrice-memorable
shoe-buckle. [Forster, i. 74. Erman, _ Memoires de Sophie Charlotte _
(Berlin, 1801), p. 130.]

Another time, it is recorded, though with less precision of detail, his
Governess the Dame Montbail having ordered him to do something which was
intolerable to the princely mind, the princely mind resisted in a very
strange way: the princely body, namely, flung itself suddenly out of a
third-story window, nothing but the hands left within; and hanging on
there by the sill, and fixedly resolute to obey gravitation rather than
Montbail, soon brought the poor lady to terms. Upon which, indeed, he
had been taken from her, and from the women altogether, as evidently now
needing rougher government. Always an unruly fellow, and dangerous
to trust among crockery. At Hanover he could do no good in the way of
breeding: sage Leibnitz himself, with his big black periwig and large
patient nose, could have put no metaphysics into such a boy. Sublime _
Theodicee _ (Leibnitzian "justification of the ways of God") was not an
article this individual had the least need of, nor at any time the least
value for. "Justify? What doomed dog questions it, then? Are you
for Bedlam, then?"--and in maturer years his rattan might have been
dangerous! For this was a singular individual of his day; human soul
still in robust health, and not given to spin its bowels into cobwebs.
He is known only to have quarrelled much with Cousin George, during the
year or so he spent in those parts.

But