ty and penitence.' Economy
and soldiers were his only topics of conversation; his chief social
amusement was to make his guests intoxicated; and as for his temper, the
accounts the Margravine gives of it would be almost incredible if they
were not amply corroborated from other sources. Suetonius has written of
the strange madness that comes on kings, but even in his melodramatic
chronicles there is hardly anything that rivals what the Margravine has
to tell us. Here is one of her pictures of family life at a Royal Court
in the last century, and it is not by any means the worst scene she
describes:

On one occasion, when his temper was more than usually bad, he told
the Queen that he had received letters from Anspach, in which the
Margrave announced his arrival at Berlin for the beginning of May.
He was coming there for the purpose of marrying my sister, and one of
his ministers would arrive previously with the betrothal ring. My
father asked my sister whether she were pleased at this prospect, and
how she would arrange her household. Now my sister had always made a
point of telling him whatever came into her head, even the greatest
home-truths, and he had never taken her outspokenness amiss. On this
occasion, therefore, relying on former experience, she answered him
as follows: 'When I have a house of my own, I shall take care to have
a well-appointed dinner-table, better than yours is, and if I have
children of my own, I shall not plague them as you do yours, and
force them to eat things they thoroughly dislike!'

'What is amiss with my dinner-table?' the King enquired, getting very
red in the face.

'You ask what is the matter with it,' my sister replied; 'there is
not enough on it for us to eat, and what there is is cabbage and
carrots, which we detest.' Her first answer had already angered my
father, but now he gave vent to his fury. But instead of punishing
my sister he poured it all on my mother, my brother, and myself. To
begin with he threw his plate at my brother's head, who would have
been struck had he not got out of the way; a second one he threw at
me, which I also happily escaped; then torrents of abuse followed
these first signs of hostility. He reproached the Queen with having
brought up her children so badly. 'You will curse your mother,' he
said to my brother, 'for having made you su