the reality of it was for him.
Ejection from house and home; into difficulty, poverty, despair; life in
furnished lodgings, which he could not pay;--and at last heart-break,
no refuge for him but in the grave. All which is mercifully hidden at
present; so that he seems to himself a man at the top-gallant of his
wishes; and lives pleasantly, among his friends, with a halo round his
head to his own foolish sense and theirs.

"Karl Albert, Kurfurst of Baiern [lazy readers ought to be reminded],
whose achievements will concern us to an unpleasant extent, for some
years, is now a lean man of forty-five; lean, erect, and of middle
stature; a Prince of distinguished look, they say; of elegant manners,
and of fair extent of accomplishment, as Princes go. His experiences in
this world, and sudden ups and downs, have been and will be many. Note a
few particulars of them; the minimum of what are indispensable here.

"English readers know a Maximilian Kurfurst of Baiern, who took into
French courses in the great Spanish-Succession War; the Anti-Marlborough
Maximilian, who was quite ruined out by the Battle of Blenheim; put
under Ban of the Empire, and reduced to depend on Louis XIV. for a
living,--till times mended with him again; till, after the Peace of
Utrecht, he got reinstated in his Territories; and lived a dozen years
more, in some comparative comfort, though much sunk in debt. Well, our
Karl Albert is the son of that Anti-Marlborough Kurfurst Maximilian;
eldest surviving son; a daughter of the great Sobieski of Poland was his
mother. Nay, he is great-grandson of another still more distinguished
Maximilian, him of the Thirty-Years War,--(who took the Jesuits to his
very heart, and let loose Ate on his poor Country for the sake of them,
in a determined manner; and was the First of all the Bavarian KURFURSTS,
mere Dukes till then; having got for himself the poor Winter-King's
Electorship, or split it into two as ultimately settled, out of that bad
Business),--great-grandson, we say, of that forcible questionable First
Kurfurst Max; and descends from Kaiser Ludwig, 'Ludwig the BAIER,' if
that is much advantage to him.

"In his young time he had a hard upcoming; seven years old at the Battle
of Blenheim, and Papa living abroad under Louis XIV.'s shelter, the poor
Boy was taken charge of by the victorious Austrian Kaisers, and brought
up in remote Austrian Towns, as a young 'Graf von Wittelsbach'
(nothing but his family name l