c. I could have almost imagined it ascending,
embodied, to heaven.

The fire of cannon announced the conclusion of the service; we put spurs
to our horses, and soon entered the lines; and, on the strength of my
credentials, I had distinguished quarters assigned to me.

I now, for the first time since I left England, began to feel the
advantages of birth. In London every man is so submerged in the
multitude, that he who can hold his head high enough out of the living
surge to be known, must have something of remarkable buoyancy, or
peculiar villany, about him. Even Parliament, except to a few of the
leaders, is no distinction. The member for the shire is clipped of all
his plumage at the moment of his entering that colossal poultry-yard,
and must take his obscure pickings with other unnoticeable fowl. In
Paris, once the Mahometan paradise of stars and garters, the central
herald's office of the earth, the royal region of the Parliament
aristocracy, where the beggar with a _cordon_ on his breast outshone the
banker with millions in his pocket-book, the world was changed; and to
be the son or brother of a peer might have been only a speedier passport
to the lamp-post. But, in Germany, the land of pedigrees, to be an
"honourable" was to be one on whom the sun shone with double beams; the
sex, young and old, smiled with double softness and the whole host of
Serenities were doubly serene. In camp, nothing could be more hospitable
or distinguished than my reception; for the soldier is always
good-humoured under canvass, and the German is good-humoured every
where. Perhaps he has rather too high an opinion of his descent from
Goth and Vandal, but he makes allowance for the more modern savagery of
Europe; and although the stranger may neither wear spectacles, nor smoke
cigars, neither muzzle his visage with mustaches, nor speak the most
formidable tongue on earth, the German will good-naturedly admit, that
he may be a human being after all.

But the man with whom my mission brought me most immediately into
contact, and to whom I was most indebted for courtesy, would have been a
remarkable personage in any country of Europe; that man was the Duke of
Brunswick.

On my arrival, I found two letters forwarded from London, and in the
hands of an aide-de-camp of the generalissimo. The first which I opened
was from the Foreign Office, a simple statement of the purpose for which
I was sent--namely, to stimulate the activity of the Pr