ut except as lights hung
out over Wilhelmina, nothing yet known, of published or manuscript, can
be regarded as good for much.

O Heavens, had one but seven-league boots, to get across that
inane country,--a bottomless whirlpool of dust and cobwebs in many
places;--where, at any rate, we had so little to do! Elucidating,
rectifying, painfully contrasting, comparing, let us try to work
out some conceivable picture of this strange Imperial MUCH ADO ABOUT
NOTHING; and get our unfortunate Crown-Prince, and our unfortunate
selves, alive through it.

Chapter VII. -- TOBACCO-PARLIAMENT.

In these distressing junctures, it may cheer the reader's spirits, and
will tend to explain for him what is coming, if we glance a little into
the Friedrich-Wilhelm TABAGIE (TABAKS-COLLEGIUM or Smoking College),
more worthy to be called Tobacco-Parliament, of which there have already
been incidental notices. Far too remarkable an Institution of the
country to be overlooked by us here.

Friedrich Wilhelm, though an absolute Monarch, does not dream of
governing without Law, still less without Justice, which he knows well
to be the one basis for him and for all Kings and men. His life-effort,
prosecuted in a grand, unconscious, unvarying and instinctive way, may
be defined rather as the effort to find out everywhere in his affairs
what was justice; to make regulations, laws in conformity with that, and
to guide himself and his Prussia rigorously by these. Truly he is not
of constitutional turn; cares little about the wigs and formalities of
justice, pressing on so fiercely towards the essence and fact of it; he
has been known to tear asunder the wigs and formalities, in a notably
impatient manner, when they stood between him and the fact. But Prussia
has its Laws withal, tolerably abundant, tolerably fixed and supreme:
and the meanest Prussian man that could find out a definite Law, coming
athwart Friedrich Wilhelm's wrath, would check Friedrich Wilhelm in
mid-volley,--or hope with good ground to do it. Hope, we say; for the
King is in his own and his people's eyes, to some indefinite extent,
always himself the supreme ultimate Interpreter, and grand living codex,
of the Laws,--always to some indefinite extent;--and there remains for a
subject man nothing but the appeal to PHILIP SOBER, in some rash cases!
On the whole, however, Friedrich Wilhelm is by no means a lawless
Monarch; nor are his Prussians slaves by any means: they are patie