" said Otto. "What
is it, then?"--"Rain gold ducats on his war-horse and him," said Otto,
looking up with a satirical grin, "till horse and Markgraf are buried in
them, and you cannot see the point of his spear atop!"--That would be a
cone of gold coins equal to the article, thinks our Markgraf; and rides
grinning away. [Michaelis, i. 271; Pauli, i. 316; Kloss; &c.]--The
poor Archbishop, a valiant pious man, finding out that late strangely
unanimous vote of his Chapter for ransoming the Markgraf, took it so
ill, that he soon died of a broken heart, say the old Books. Die he
did, before long;--and still Otto's Brother was refused as successor.
Brother, however, again survived; behaved always wisely; and Otto at
last had his way. "Makes an excellent Archbishop, after all!" said the
Magdeburgers. Those were rare times, Mr. Rigmarole.

The same Otto, besieging some stronghold of his Magdeburg or other
enemies, got an arrow shot into the skull of him; into, not through;
which no surgery could extract, not for a year to come. Otto went about,
sieging much the same, with the iron in his head; and is called Otto MIT
DEM PFOILE, Otto SAGITTARIUS, or Otto with the Arrow, in consequence.
A Markgraf who writes Madrigals; who does sieges with an arrow in
his head; who lies in a wooden cage, jeered by the Magdeburgers, and
proposes such a cone of ducats: I thought him the memorablest of those
forgotten Markgraves; and that his jolting Life-pilgrimage might stand
as the general sample. Multiply a year of Otto by 200, you have, on easy
conditions, some imagination of a History of the Ascanier Markgraves.
Forgettable otherwise; or it can be read in the gross, darkened with
endless details, and thrice-dreary, half-intelligible traditions, in
Pauli's fatal Quartos, and elsewhere, if any one needs.--The year of
that Magdeburg speech about the cone of ducats is 1278: King Edward the
First, in this country, was walking about, a prosperous man of forty,
with very LONG SHANKS, and also with a head of good length.

Otto, as had been the case in the former Line, was a frequent name
among those Markgraves: "Otto the Pious" (whom we saw crusading once in
Preussen, with King Ottocar his Brother-in-law), "Otto the Tall," "Otto
the Short (PARVUS);" I know not how many Ottos besides him "with
the Arrow." Half a century after this one of the ARROW (under his
Grand-Nephew it was), the Ascanier Markgraves ended, their Line also
dying out.

Not the suc