t can be of any advantage to them. A
Prussian Majesty who gives us 150 pounds yearly, with board and lodging
and the run of his cellar, and honors such as these, is not to be
lightly sneezed away, though of queer humors now and then. The
highest Personages, as we said, more than once made gifts to Gundling;
miniatures set in diamonds; purses of a hundred ducats: even Gundling,
it was thought, might throw in a word, mad or otherwise, which would
bear fruit. It was said of him, he never spoke to harm anybody with his
Majesty. The poor blown-up blockhead was radically not ill-natured,--at
least, if you let his "phosphorescences" alone.

But the grandest explosions, in Tobacco-Parliament, were producible,
when you got Two literary fools; and, as if with Leyden-jars, positive
and negative, brought their vanities to bear on one another. This
sometimes happened, when Tobacco-Parliament was in luck. Friedrich
Wilhelm had a variety of Merry-Andrew Raths of the Gundling sort,
though none ever came up to Gundling, or approached him, in worth as a
Merry-Andrew.

Herr Fassmann, who wrote Books, by Patronage or for the Leipzig
Booksellers, and wandered about the world as a star or comet of some
magnitude, is not much known to my readers:--but he is too well known
to me, for certain dark Books of his which I have had to read. [_Life of
Friedrich Wilhelm,_ occasionally cited here; _Life of August the Strong;
_ &c.] A very dim Literary Figure; undeniable, indecipherable Human
Fact, of those days; now fallen quite extinct and obsolete; his
garniture, equipment, environment all very dark to us. Probably a too
restless, imponderous creature, too much of the Gundling type; structure
of him GASEOUS, not solid; Perhaps a little of the coxcomb naturally;
much of the sycophant on compulsion,--being sorely jammed into corners,
and without elbow-room at all, in this world. Has, for the rest, a
recognizable talent for "Magazine writing,"--for Newspaper editing, had
that rich mine, "California of the Spiritually Vagabond," been opened in
those days. Poor extinct Fassmann, one discovers at last a vein of weak
geniality in him; here and there, real human sense and eyesight, under
those strange conditions; and his poor Books, rotted now to inanity,
have left a small seed-pearl or two, to the earnest reader. Alas, if
he WAS to become "spiritually vagabond" ("spiritually" and otherwise),
might it not perhaps be wholesome to him that the California was