purity and
continence of life; how divine is the blush of young human cheeks; how
high, beneficent, sternly inexorable if forgotten, is the duty laid, not
on women only, but on every creature, in regard to these particulars?
Well; if such a day never come again, then I perceive much else will
never come. Magnanimity and depth of insight will never come; heroic
purity of heart and of eye; noble pious valor, to amend us and the
age of bronze and lacquer, how can they ever come? The scandalous
bronze-lacquer age, of hungry animalisms, spiritual impotencies and
mendacities, will have to run its course, till the Pit swallow it."--

In the case of Friedrich, it is certain such a day never fully came. The
"age of bronze and lacquer," so as it then stood,--relieved truly by a
backbone of real Spartan IRON (of right battle STEEL when needed): this
was all the world he ever got to dream of. His ideal, compared to that
of some, was but low; his existence a hard and barren, though a genuine
one, and only worth much memory in the absence of better. Enough of all
that.

THE PHYSICALLY STRONG PAYS HIS COUNTER-VISIT.

August the Strong paid his Return-visit in May following. Of which
sublime transaction, stupendous as it then was to the Journalistic mind,
we should now make no mention, except for its connection with those
points,--and more especially for a foolish rumor, which now rose about
Prince Fred and the Double-Marriage, on occasion of it. The magnificence
of this visit and reception being so extreme,--King August, for one
item, sailing to it, with sound of trumpet and hautbois, in silken
flotillas gayer than Cleopatra's, down the Elbe,--there was a rush
towards Berlin of what we will not call the scum, but must call the foam
of mankind, rush of the idle moneyed populations from all countries;
and such a crowd there, for the three weeks, as was seldom seen. Foam
everywhere is stirred up, and encouraged to get under way.

Prince Frederick of Hanover and England, "Duke of Edinburgh" as they now
call him, "Duke of Gloucester" no longer, it would seem, nor "Prince of
Wales" as yet; he, foamy as another, had thoughts of coming; and rumor
of him rose very high in Berlin,--how high we have still singular proof.
Here is a myth, generated in the busy Court-Imagination of Berlin at
this time; written down by Pollnitz as plain fact afterwards; and from
him idly copied into COXE [Coxe's _Walpole_ (London, 1798), i. 520.] and
othe