ewels for flight, and very likely
arranged its details with her lover, in that last long night's interview,
after which Philip of Koenigsmarck was seen no more.

Koenigsmarck, inflamed with drink--there is scarcely any vice of which,
according to his own showing, this gentleman was not a practitioner--had
boasted at a supper at Dresden of his intimacy with the two Hanoverian
ladies, not only with the princess, but with another lady powerful in
Hanover. The Countess Platen, the old favourite of the Elector, hated the
young Electoral princess. The young lady had a lively wit, and constantly
made fun of the old one. The princess's jokes were conveyed to the old
Platen just as our idle words are carried about at this present day: and
so they both hated each other.

The characters in the tragedy, of which the curtain was now about to fall,
are about as dark a set as eye ever rested on. There is the jolly prince,
shrewd, selfish, scheming, loving his cups and his ease (I think his good
humour makes the tragedy but darker); his princess, who speaks little but
observes all; his old, painted Jezebel of a mistress; his son, the
Electoral prince, shrewd too, quiet, selfish, not ill-humoured, and
generally silent, except when goaded into fury by the intolerable tongue
of his lovely wife; there is poor Sophia Dorothea, with her coquetry and
her wrongs, and her passionate attachment to her scamp of a lover, and her
wild imprudences, and her mad artifices, and her insane fidelity, and her
furious jealousy regarding her husband (though she loathed and cheated
him), and her prodigious falsehoods; and the confidante, of course, into
whose hands the letters are slipped; and there is Lothario, finally, than
whom, as I have said, one can't imagine a more handsome, wicked, worthless
reprobate.

[Illustration]

A Deed Of Darkness

How that perverse fidelity of passion pursues the villain! How madly true
the woman is, and how astoundingly she lies! She has bewitched two or
three persons who have taken her up, and they won't believe in her wrong.
Like Mary of Scotland, she finds adherents ready to conspire for her even
in history, and people who have to deal with her are charmed, and
fascinated, and bedevilled. How devotedly Miss Strickland has stood by
Mary's innocence! Are there not scores of ladies in this audience who
persist in it too? Innocent! I remember as a boy how a great