eigning sovereigns, the King of
Prussia is perhaps the most gifted in this way; of course, less endowed
with that shrewd appreciation of character, that intuitive perception
of every man's bias, which marks the Monarch of the Tuileries, but
possessed of other and very different qualities, and with one especially
which never can be overvalued--an earnest sincerity of purpose in every
thing. There is no escaping from the conviction, that here is a man who
reflects and wills, and whose appeal to conscience is the daily rule
of life. The Nationality of Germany is his great object, and for it he
labours as strenuously--may it be as successfully!--as ever his "Great"
predecessor did to accomplish the opposite. What a country would it be
if the same spirit of nationality were to prevail from the Baltic to
the Black Sea, and "Germany" have a political signification as well as a
geographical one!

After all, if we have outlived the age of heroic monarchy, we have
happily escaped that of royal debauches. A celebrated Civil Engineer
of our day is reported to have said, in his examination before a
parliamentary committee, that he regarded "rivers as intended by
Providence to supply navigable canals;" in the same spirit one might
opine certain characters of royalty were created to supply materials for
Vaudevilles.

What would become of the minor theatres of Paris if Louis XIV., and
Richelieu, and the Regency were to be interdicted? On whose memory dare
they hang so much of shameless vice and iniquitous folly? Where find
characters so degraded, so picturesque, so abandoned, so infamous, and
so amusing? What time and trouble, too, are saved by the adoption of
this era! No need of wearisome explanations and biographical details of
the _dramatis persono_. When one reads the word "Marquis," he knows
it means a man whose whole aim in life is seduction; while "Madame la
Marquise" is as invariably the easy victim of royal artifice.

It might open a very curious view into the distinctive nature of
national character to compare the recognised class to which vice is
attributed in different countries; for while in England we select
the aristocracy always, as the natural subjects for depravity, in
the Piedmontese territory all the stage villains are derived from the
mercantile world. Instead of a Lord, as with us, the seducer is always
a Manufacturer or a Shipowner; and _vice_ a Captain of Dragoons, their
terror of domestic peace, is a Cotton