and acts
of ill-neighborship; he, a just King, was sorrier than any man to hear
of them; and would give immediate order that they should end. But they
always went on again, much the same; and never did end. I am sorry
a just King, led astray by his Hobby, answers thus what is only
superficially the fact. But it seems he cannot help it: his Hobby is too
strong for him; regardless of curb and bridle in this instance. Let us
pity a man of genius, mounted on so ungovernable a Hobby; leaping
the barriers, in spite of his best resolutions. Perhaps the poetic
temperament is more liable to such morbid biases, influxes of
imaginative crotchet, and mere folly that cannot be cured? Friedrich
Wilhelm never would or could dismount from his Hobby: but he rode
him under much sorrow henceforth; under showers of anger and
ridicule;--contumelious words and procedures, as it were SAXA ET FAECES,
battering round him, to a heavy extent; the rider a victim of Tragedy
and Farce both at once.

QUEEN SOPHIE'S TROUBLES: GRUMKOW WITH THE OLD DESSAUER, AND GRUMKOW
WITHOUT HIM.

Queen Sophie had, by delicate management, got over those first rubs, aud
arrived at a Treaty of Hanover, and clear ground again; far worse rubs
lay ahead; but smooth travelling, towards such a goal, was not possible
for this Queen. Poor Lady, her Court, as we discern from Wilhelmina
and the Books, is a sad welter of intrigues, suspicions; of treacherous
chambermaids, head-valets, pickthank scouts of official gentlemen and
others striving to supplant one another. Satan's Invisible World very
busy against Queen Sophie! Under any terms, much more under those of the
Double-Marriage, her place in a kindly but suspicious Husband's favor
was difficult to maintain. Restless aspirants, climbing this way or
that, by ladder-steps discoverable in this abstruse element, are never
wanting, and have the due eavesdropping satellites, now here, now there.
Queen Sophie and her party have to walk warily, as if among precipices
and pitfalls. Of all which wide welter of extinct contemptibilities,
then and there so important, here and now become minus quantities, we
again notice the existence, but can undertake no study or specification
whatever. Two Incidents, the latter of them dating near the point where
we now are, will sufficiently instruct the reader what a welter this
was, in which Queen Sophie and her bright little Son, the new Major of
the Potsdam Giants, had to pass their exist