Where the usurping Corse decreed
Bourbon's heroic son should bleed.*
They met; and soon redress was had
Of him that called the supper bad;
And as he lay and bit the ground,
Sinking beneath a fatal wound,
With faultering accent still he cried
"'Twas a bad supper," and so died.

In the interval between our tour to the Harz and the departure of Coleridge and his friend Chester from Göttingen, there occurred a very enlivening little episode at Hesse-Cassel. The king and queen of Prussia, who were met by many of the minor sovereign princes of Germany, paid a visit to the Landgrave, who did honour to his august visitors, by displaying at a review the assembled militia of his realm. His splendid capital, yet so extremely dull in general, was changed into a scene of bustle and festivity. But prior to our going thither, we had a glimpse of the queen at Hardenburg-house, situate a few miles from Göttingen. Here she put up for a night, and, on her arrival, was greeted by the loud acclamations of a vast multitude, among whom were the English-Göttingensers, one and all.

These were the queen's halcyon days. Misfortunes had not yet sullied the lustre of this lovely object of

*This is not topographically correct. The Duke D'Enghien fell, not at the Bois de Boulogne, where the duel was fought, but in the court of the prison of Vincennes.

Prussian idolatry; and no one seemed to think that too much homage could be done to her beauty and her virtues. All, it is true, that we saw of her Majesty at Hardenburg-house was seen through the windows of the parlour in which she supped; but this sufficed to send us back to Göttingen fully impressed with the justice of her fame, which assigned to her-in addition to sparkling eyes and auburn hair, and a sweet expression of countenance—a form as elegant as could give interest to manners the most unaffected and pleasing; which was pretty good allowance, considering that our inferences were derived from nothing more precise than a few peeps through the windows.

Frequent opportunities, however, of further observation, which afterwards occurred, served but to confirm the correctness of our first impressions, and to enhance the depth of that eventful tragedy in which she was destined, no long time afterwards, to be so prominent a character. And all this, whilst her husband's sceptre lay prostrate in the dust, until (after afflictions the most humiliating, in atonement for too selfish a line of policy, and a misplaced confidence in his own strength) he was enabled to reclaim it, by taking advantage of a course of events which no human foresight could have predicted, nor any merely human agency have brought about.

But I am rather getting before my narrative. At the early hour of three in the morning we set off-the

two Parrys,

and myself, for Hesse-Cassel; and, on the following Monday, were present at the review of upwards of 15,000 Hessian troops. The day was fine as ever was day in June; but so excessively hot, that the men, who were under arms from an early hour in the morning until after mid-day, must have had quite enough of it; and so in fact we all had; but we were nevertheless much gratified by so excellent an opportunity of witnessing a well-contested, but bloodless battle, on a scale of no inconsiderable magnitude, and with all the splendour of a courtly retinue. I do not think I should succeed, if I were to attempt to enter into military details; but I may truly and safely say, that the havoc made, by this merely playing at the game of war, on some crops of growing corn, which happened to be within the ambit of the manoeuvring battalions, gave us no unintelligible hint of the fearful ravages of actual warfare.

In the course of the day, his Prussian majesty took repeated opportunities of riding up to the carriages in which the queen and other ladies of high degree were seated, in order to give them, as we supposed, some piece of information that might make the scene more interesting to them, by making it more intelligible. Coleridge came on foot from Göttingen, and joined our party at the review; but the Landgrave was far from being a favourite with him, and he appeared, owing perhaps to the fatigue of his walk, to be by no

means in a right mood for enjoying the noise of arms, and the pageantry with which we were surrounded. On the evening of the following day, which, I believe, was the only entire day he spent at Cassel, I took a walk with him in the magnificent gardens which adorn this really princely residence; and which, at night-fall, were illumined by a very grand display of fire-works. But from his continuing still in some measure out of spirits, even these were scarcely able to engage his attention, and rather than bestow on them his entire approbation, he was feign to contrast them with the stars which spangled the vault of heaven, up which the moon was likewise then ascending in unrivalled brightness. Being, however, myself, more bent on sublunary pursuits than sydereal contemplations, I made some excuse, as soon as I conveniently could, for leaving him, to rejoin a merrier party, who were busy in making preparations for a court masquerade, to which we had been so fortunate as to gain admission tickets. Coleridge returned to Göttingen before we did, so that we saw little more of him during the remainder of the Cassel festivities.

It must have been at this time that the accidental conversation "with an old peasant, in a central part of Germany," took place, which he has related in No. XV. of "The Friend," purposely omitting names, he says, because the day of retribution has come and gone by; but this was really an excess of delicacy,

as it is known to every one that the German mercenaries, employed by England in the American war, were chiefly procured from the Hessian market. Neither did any one, either then or since, in England or in Germany, if secure from the petty tyrant's grasp, disguise their abhorrence of his venal conduct.

had

"I was looking," he informs us, "at a strong fortress in the distance, which formed a highly interesting object in a rich and varied landscape, and asked an old man, who had stopped to gaze at me, its name, &c., adding, 'How beautiful it looks! It may be well ' enough to look at,' answered he, but God keep all Christians from being taken thither!' He then proceeded to gratify the curiosity which he had thus excited, by informing me, that the Baron been taken out of his bed at midnight, and carried to that fortress; that he was not heard of for nearly two years, when a soldier, who had fled over the boundaries, sent information to his family of the place and mode of his imprisonment. Had not the language and countenance of my informant precluded such a suspicion, I might have supposed that he had been repeating, in the shocking detail that followed, some tale of horror from a romance of the dark ages. What was his crime? I asked. 'The report is,' said the old man, that, in his capacity as minister, he remonstrated with the — concerning the extravagance of his mistress, an outlandish countess, and that she