صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني
[graphic][subsumed][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small]

Bell's

COURT AND FASHIONABLE

MAGAZINE,

For AUGUST, 1807.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

OF

ILLUSTRIOUS LADIES.

The Twenty-first Number.

HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN OF PRUSSIA.

LOUISA AUGUSTA WILHELMINA AMELIA, Queen of Prussia, was born on the 10th of March 1776; she is the daughter of Duke Charles Louis Frederick, sovereign of the duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and niece of her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain. She was betrothed to her royal consort in February, and married on the 24th December 1793. Handsome in her person, accomplished in her manners, with a mind equally elevated and noble, she possesses talents sufficient, if left unbiassed, to alleviate the burden of state to her royal consort. Misled, or prejudiced, she, by a fatality belonging to our wretched times, || became an indirect instrument to support usurpation in France, by forsaking her native dignity, and condescending to put herself on a level with a revolutionary Empress, and by not dissuading her husband from forming those scandalous relations, which united him with the most atrocious of usurpers.

Whether impolitic errors of courts may as justly be attributed to depraved and immoral courtiers, as shameful and dangerous transactions of cabinets are to ignorant or corrupted ministers, the sovereigns of the Prussian Monarchy have certainly since 1795 been encompassed by every thing derogatory to greatness, undermining rank, insulting virtue, humiliating loyalty, and destructive to social order. What can contemporaries think, what must posterity judge of cer

tain transactions, and of certain connections of the cabinet of Berlin? Does it not seem as if every confidential attendant of the Prussian Queen was studying to degrade her, and every confidential counsellor of the Prussian King was a traitor conspiring against lawful sovereignty, or at least a well paid pensioner of usurpation, or an artful intriguer in its pay, plotting against all ancient dynasties?

The day on which Prussia forsook the coalition by the treaty of Basle, she inclosed herself in a circle of dangers. She broke the obligation of her alliances without being able to form any, took umbrage at being reproached, resumed that national hatred, which the wisdom of the Emperor Leopold, and the patriotism of Frederick William II. had abjured; and forgot revolutionary France to dread Austria and Russia. Assisted by these fatal dissentions, Bonaparte and his predecessors have pursued their disorganizations, plots and usurpations.

Justice and impartiality require, however, that it should also be remarked, that the lustre of the Prussian Monarchy was clouded before their Majesties began to reign. It was obscured, if not darkened, by its treaties with the regicide French republic. This was however not surprising. The late King, enervated by debauchery, and influenced by corrupt or depraved mistresses, became the easy dupe of seduction, and a prey te

delusion. During his last years the reins of state were directed by revolutionary illuminati, by political quacks, or by unprincipled women. The errors and vices of his government, although reprehensible and complained of, were nevertheless justly ascribed to others, not to himself. But when, shortly after the accession of their present Majesties, the ex-Abbé Sieyes, the most infamously notorious of regicides, was admitted as an ambassador at Berlin, loyalty was dejected, and rebellion reared its head in triumph. Notwithstanding any thing a Haugwitz, a Schoulem- || bourg, or a Hardenberg, may have asserted to the contrary, the assassin of one King could never be a proper person to figure in the court of another. But many thought that even this humiliating act was merely a temporary though a degrading measure, commanded by imperious cir

cumstances.

In the year 1799, when the most artful as well as the most outrageous of usurpers had seized on the throne of the Bourbons, all truly loyal and religious men began to be alarmed at the conduct of the Prussian cabinet. The manner in which Bonaparte's emissary Duroc was cajoled and caressed at the court of Berlin did not diminish their apprehensions. He was not only treated with the same ceremony as the representative of a legitimate sovereign, but with a distinction unusual as well as unbecoming. Being one day permitted to be present at the parade of the garrison of Berlin, he expressed some approbation of the scarfs of the officers of the King's body guards. No sooner was her Prussian Majesty informed of his condescension, than she, or rather her courtiers, caused her to degrade her rank and elevation, and to forget that this Duroc was nothing but the valet of a mean adventurer, who six years before could not have obtained the commission of a subaltern in the Prussian service. The Queen is said to have knitted with her own hands a scarf;-it is known that she presented one to Duroc with her own hand on the day he took leave.

This impolitic step (which took place during the winter of 1799), to say no worse of it, encouraged Bonaparte to send during the winter of 1800, his brother Louis to fraternize with the King, Queen, and royal family at Berlin. As might be expected, this Prince of Corsican blood was brutal, they were enduring; he was insolent and they were condescending; he behaved, from want of education, from presump

tion and vanity, like an upstart sans-culotte; they, like sovereigns, like princes and princesses, who saw that they had advanced too far, but who had not courage or disinterestedness enough to retreat, and instead of entertaining and feasting this ill-bred vagabond at Berlin, at Potsdam, at Charlottenbourg, or at Sans Souci, to shut him up amongst his equals, at Magdebourg or at Spandau.

The King and Queen are fond of retirement.The winter of 1800 was passed by the royal family, not in the palace, but in a private house at Berlin, to save, as was reported, the expence of many fires, wood being rather dear. Every day, about one o'clock in the afternoon, the King took a walk, without any other suite than one of his Majesty's aid-de-camps. The Queen at the same hour took an airing in a plain postchaise, so plain that not its equal is found in any inn of Great Britain: behind the post-chaise stood two servants, and by her side was either her brother or some lady of her court. She was accompanied with no guards, or any attendants in any other carriage. Among a people, whose religious ideas were shaken under Frederick the Great; whose morals were corrupted under the reign of his successor; and who, under the present reign, have listened with avidity to the revolutionary doctrine of French emissaries, and who have seen their Sovereign by treaties descend to a level with the present as well as with former usurpers in France, all base as well as criminal, such an affected simplicity will certainly not augment their loyalty.

Every day during the same winter, when the weather permitted, the young Prince Royal and his cousin, nearly of his own age, son of the late Prince Lewis, took a walk on a place called the Linden, accompanied with no other person but their governor, a brother, and a son of a baker at Magdeburg. The children of tradesmen in good circumstances in England are much better dressed than those two Princes were; and no merchant's clerk in this country is so shabbily accoutred, as was their governor, an honest man, who would make an excellent usher in a charity school.

The Queen of Prussia is the tender mother of six children: four Princes and two Princesses; of whom the eldest was born on the 15th of October 1795, and the youngest on the 15th of January 1805.

ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS.

THE CRIMINAL.

IN the whole history of man, there is no chapter more instructive for the heart and mind than the annals of his deviations. By every great crime, a power proportionally great has been exerted. When the secret operation of our desire conceals itself by the fainter light of common affections, in he state of violent passion it becomes more rampant, more gigantic, and more visible; the more penetrating observer of mankind, who knows best what dependence we ought to place on the mechanism of the common free will, and how far we are entitled to draw analogous conclusions, w I transplant from this province into his pneumatology many facts, and them useful for moral life.

The human heart is something so very uniform, and, at the same time, so very complex, that one and the same ability, or desire, can operate in a thousand different forms and directions; can effect a thousand inconsistent phenomena; and can appear differently combined in a thousand characters; while, on the other hand, a thousand dissimilar characters and actions may be deduced from the same disposition, even when the person of whom we speak has not the least idea that such an affinity exists. Should there a Linneus arise from the human race, as for the other realms of nature, who classified according to instincts and dispositions, how much should we be surprised to see many a one, whose vices are confined to the small sphere of common life, and circumscribed by the narrow limits of the laws, ranked in the same order with the monster Borgia,

If we consider the matter in this point of view, many objections may be made against the common method of treating history; and here also, I suppose, lies the difficulty, why the study of it has hitherto proved so little beneficial to common life. Betwixt the violent emotions in the mind of the acting person, and the calm composure of the reader, to whom this action is recounted, there exists a disagreeable contrast, there lies such an immensity of distance, that it is difficult for the latter, nay almost impossible for him, to form even an idea of a connection. There remains a chasm betwixt the historical subject and the reader, which cuts off every possibility of a comparison or application; and, instead of exciting that salutary terror, which No. XXI. Vol. III.

warns proud health, it produces only astonishment, expressed by a shake of the head. We look upon the unfortunate person (who, in the hour that he committed the action, equally as in that which he suffers for it, was a human being like ourselves), as a creatureof a different species, whose blood circulates otherwise than ours, and whose will is subject to other laws; his fate affects us but little, for sympathy is only founded on a remote consciousness of similar danger, and we are far from even dreaming of such a similarity. The lesson, therefore, is lost with the application, and history, instead of proving a school to enlighten us, must rest content with the pitiful merit of satisfying our curiosty. If she is to interest us more, if she is to attain her great aim, she must of necessity choose one of these two methods. The reader must either become warm as the hero, or the hero must be cold as the reader.

I know, that many of the best historians, both modern and ancient, have embraced the first method, and have engaged the hearts of their readers by an eloquent style. But this manner is an usurpation of the writer, and encroaches on the republican liberty of the reading world, who are entitled to ju 'ge for themselves; it is, at the same time, an infringement of those laws hat limit the science, for this method is peculiarly and exclusively assigned to the orator and the poet. For the historian, the latter only remains.

The hero must be cold as the reader, or, what is here equally the same, we must be acquainted with him, before he acts; we must see him not only achieve his action, but see him wish to achieve it. His thoughts are much more important to us than his actions, and the springs of his thoughts still more so than the consequences of those actions. The soil of Vesuvius hath been investigated, in order to ascertain the origin of its conflagration; and why do we bestow less of our attention on a moral than on a physical phenomenon? Why do we not pay the same degree of regard to the nature and situation of affairs which environed such a person, till the collected tinder caught fire in his soul? The strange and marvellous in such a phenomenon charms the dreamer, who delights in the wonderful. The friend of truth seeks for a mother to these lost children. He seeks her in the unalterable struc

« السابقةمتابعة »