BOOKS.

A PATRIOTIC ROYAL HEROINE: QUEEN LOUISA OF PRUSSIA.* Two book should brii:ig the writer from Potsdam the enamelled Maltese Cross which constitutes the badge of the Prussian Luisen Order. A mistress of her materials, and gifted with fine powers of reflection, the authoress commands a vigoroqs, original style equally adapted to personal por- traiture and general description. Full of life, and of excellent

historic explanations, is the record of the girlhood of the beautiful Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and of the cir-

cumstances which led to her marriage, at the age of nineteen, to the Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia, the great nephew of "014 Fritz," whose death, in 1786, came ten years after Louisa's birth. The "ogre of Potsdam" was a false

prophet vdben his little grand-nephew's taking looks drew from him the remark : "I shall reign again in him."

Frederick William III., as ruler from 1797 to 1840, was always a shoddy Hohenzollern: his chief merit was his constant attachment to his Louisa, who during her short connubial life always returned the love of her weak, unattrac-, tire husband :— " The written testimony of eye-witnesses points to even greater loveliness than is indicated by the efforts of any contemporary painter. The sculptured representations of Schadow and Rauch convey some impression of the stately beauty of her womanhood. But it would have needed the genius of a Romney to portray all the witehery of the young Louisa, with her tall graceful figure, her exquisite face, her complexion which aroused the enthusiasm of Xademe Le Brun, her laughing eyes, and the sunny locks that 'Ming on her temples like a golden fleece.'" But the young Queen was much more than a mere type of bodily atelier perfection; her other powers made her a pillar of the Monarchy. While the silent and retiring

Frederick William III. was not a ruler to magnetise his

subjects, his wants of social gifts was compensated by the courtesy, tact, and facility of appropriate speech always at the command of his lovely consort, whether the occasion was a palatial function, a. Royal progress, or an incidental expression of popular loyalty demanding ready recognition. The journey of the young couple Ida Konigsberg to Warsaw, where they received the homage of the local Estates, is graphically described by the Queen's Mistress of the Robes, Griifm Voss. Although the Poles were still smarting under the partition of their country and the annexation of their capital t,o Prussia, in which the new King had taken a military part, at the sight of Louisa they dropped their resent-

ment,,-they "literally fell down and worshipped her." Not

long afterwards Jean Paul Richter sent Louisa a copy of his Titan, and, struck by her possession of the girdle of Venus,

observed: Her Majesty is the crowned Aphrodite, the lovely Queen who wrote and invited me to Sans Souci." 'Amongst Louisa's other worshippers were the great theologian Schleier- macher, the familiar Shakespearean Schlegel, the dramatist

Kleist, the great author of Undine, and Goethe. As to the seinirRomanticipt " Novalia," he seems to have taken leave of his senses when he urged every mother to hang up the Queen's portrait in her daughter's room so that the young girls should always have before them "a lively reminder of tb ideal to which they should seek to e.onform their lives."

The tributes of prose and poetry paid to the national idol after her early death had no end. In particular, the illustrious

Wilhelm von Humboldt, insisting on the value of Louisa's political services, called her loss a public calamity, the void

caused by which no one could fill: "Her Majesty possessed in

a stilleVieOire degree the power of ptitting new life i4to others, of reassuring, encouraging, animating."

Oar authoress quotes the testimuny of the English Ambat %Our at Berlin to show that diplomatic society was penetrated

by Wimp like thobe of the literary world

"A representation of 'Alexander's return from his Indian

• V LAsi4as al Proia. Py Mary Maxwpil Moffat. Wit4420 Illustraions. LOA0ns a_othua sad Co. 17e. bd, net.] victories' was the chief feature of the fete given in honour of the Queen's birthday, 10th March, 1804. Sir George Jackson recounts that the Queen herself took the part of Statira, the daughter of Darius. She makes a conquest of the conqueror at first sight, which no doubt our Queen of beauty would have done had the hero had the happiness of seeing her."

On October 14th, 1806, Frederick met with his Issue on the banks of the Seale, and the Prussian Statira fell a victim to the blackguardisms which the modern Alexander substituted for the chivalrous methods of the great Macedonian. Happily for herself and humanity, the Queen, who was in the rear of her husband's annihilated army, retreated on

Berlin by way of Weimar, where the conqueror, arriving immediately after his double victory, and thinking to

intimidate the Duchess with his usual brutalities of manner, was received by that noble lady on his entry of the palace with a defiant attitude which drew from him the remark : "There is a woman whom our two hundred cannon cannot

frighten." Installed in the ducal residence, he at once issued the first of a torrent of bulletins by which he

hoped to discredit the fugitive Prussian Queen in the eyes of Eumpe, which was told that "the Queen never ceased to urge the King and his generals to give battle. Blood she would have, and the beat blood in the country has been poured out at her behest." This indictment, backed by an article in the Moniteur, which compared Louisa to "Armida setting fire to her palace with her own bands," was reiterated with every variation that malignity could suggest. It was

reinforced by the series of abominable insinuations against the immaculate Louisa's virtue poured forth in the Berlin bulletins, in which even Thiers recognised "the licentiousness of the ungenerous soldier." After the murder of the Duo d'Engbien, the Czar Alexander had visited Berlin, where he and the King of Prussia swore eternal friendship at the tomb of Frederick the Great. Napoleon's bulletin version of this simple episode is thus rendered by our authoress :— "The result of the famous oath sworn by the tomb of Frederick the Great was the Battle of Austerlitz, and the speedy evacuation of Germany by the Russian arrny. Twenty- four hours after the midnight vow there appeared an engraving of the scene, now on view in all the shops of Berlin, at the sight of which the very peasants are convulsed with laughter. It shows the handsome Czar of Russia with the Queen beside him, while the King is laying his hand on the tomb of Frederick. The Queen has a shawl thrown about her, and recalls the London picture of Lady Hamilton (query, did Napoleon mean Romney's Bacchante now in the National Gallery?] as, with her hand on her heart, she turns towards the Czar By this time everybody knows that the Queen is responsible for all the woes that have come upon the nation. Everywhere people are saying, She was so good, so gentle, only a year ago ; but what a change in her since the fatal visit of the Czar Alexander. In her room at Potsdam there has been found a portrait of him presented to the Queen by himself."

To this Miss Moffat appends the words, "And so on, and so on," to which we should have preferred the explanation that the paragraph as printed is compounded from two separate bulletins numbered 28 and 29, and that all these documents appeared in the Berlin Telegraph. Napoleon's mean theft of the swords and Orders of "Old Fritz," hitherto preserved on his tomb, is mentioned; but the story of the act of schoolboy-like revenge for Frederick's victory over the

French at Rossbach perpetrated by the Emperor, who had the little local pillar commemorating that battle knocked down and packed in a cart for transmission to Paris, is too shortly told, and we hear nothing of the similar operation effected on the "Victory and Horses" of the Brandenburg Gate of Berlin.

The progress of the war soon drew the Royal pair to the Russian frontier, where Frederick William joined his ally the Czar, the resistance of whose army to the French advance induced Napoleon, after his victory of Friedland, to meet Alexander on the historic raft of the Niemen in front of the

little Prussian town of Tilsit. Queen Louisa being there- upon informed by her husband that, in the opinion of the Czar, with whom Talleyrand and Murat appeared to agree, it was desirable that her powers of persuasion should be brought to bear on her reviler, notwithstanding her doubts, and the con- dition of bodily weakness brought upon her by her life of privation and a severe recent illness, she moved from Memel, her Baltic coign of vantage, to the neighbourhood of Tilsit, where she made herself mistress of the facts of the local political situation. With Napoleon it was a case of "metabolism," as we now say. The Corsican parvenu, transformed for the time

into a monarch with Bourbon manners, appearing at the head of a cavalcade of Marshals, paid the Queen a protracted visit, when she defended Prussian claims and interests with the skill of a practised diplomatist. Napoleon, for his own reasons, trying to turn the discussion away from a certain channel by asking flippant questions about her toilet, the ingenious victim replied : "Shall we talk of chiffons at a moment like this ?" When he afterwards shirked a reply as to the retention by Prussia of the town and fortress of Magdeburg, which he meant to annex, she boldly said : "You are not answering my questions, and yet it would cost you but a word to make the terms of peace acceptable." At the critical moment the unlucky Frederick William came into the room, thereby, as we are told, spoiling his wife's game. Napoleon afterwards said to the Czar : "If he had left me with the Queen for another quarter of an hour I would have promised her anything she asked." At St. Helena he pretended that if she had come earlier to Tilsit they would have obtained better terms. The Queen, he said, "took the lead in the conversation, and checked every attempt to divert it from the subjects she wished me to consider."

The Emperor's performances in his capacity of gentleman were not yet exhausted. He invited his Royal acquaintances to a banquet such as his commissariat and little Tilsit could supply :—

"Napoleon, says Countess Voss, received her mistress with a countenance in which embarrassment and maliciousness were

struggling for the mastery After the Emperor and his guests had risen from the table Queen Louisa made her way to an open window and stood there alone. Presently Napoleon approached her for what proved to be their last interchange of words. Her sorrowful look checked his hollow protestations of regret that he had been unable to comply with her wishes. Tradition tells, that to relieve the feeling of constraint he turned to a rose plant placed near the window and, breaking off a flower, offered it to his companion. She hesitated a moment, then, seeing her way to a final effort on behalf of her country, she said beseechingly, At least with Magdeburg." Your Majesty has forgotten our relative positions,' was the curt rejoinder. What I offer is for you to receive without conditions." Your rose is too thorny,' said Louisa, ignoring the double meaning of his words. As the Emperor conducted her to her carriage, she could not forbear commenting on the needless cruelty wherewith he had raised her hopes merely to disappoint them. This time his only reply was what she afterwards described as 'a satanic smile.'"

The dissection of all these Tilsit stories, from the raft to the rose, into their various elements of truth and fable is, in our opinion, impossible, and we must observe that the above quotation is not, as far as we can discover, to be found in the Memoirs of Countess Voss, to which the authoress refers.

Two days later Frederick William was forced to sign the Treaty surrendering to the French tyrant half his kingdom and five millions of his subjects. No wonder if the Queen, in her later references to the Tilsit episode, "sometimes recalled the saying of Mary Tudor with regard to Calais, and declared that Magdeburg would be found written upon her heart when she was dead." On the occasion of the hopeless attempt of Wordsworth's "meteor in a darksome night," Schill, to surprise that fortress when in permanent French occupation, "the monster," as Louisa called Napoleon, reverted to his old vulgarian habits : he bad the Queen caricatured as a soldier in the uniform of Schill's regiment.

During the three years that came between Tilsit and her early death, Louisa took a part in political affairs, usefully supporting, as a rule, the legislative reforms of Stein and Hardenberg, and helping Humboldt in his educational creations, herself founding a model school on the system of the Swiss Pestalozzi, by whose writings she had been fascinated. Louisa was not philosophically disposed, like the profound Queen of Frederick I., who would discuss "the infinitely little" with her teacher, Leibnitz; but she studied and annotated the manuscripts of a lecturer on history at the new University of Konigsberg, systematically questioning him on the points of his discourses which she did not understand.

Her premature death was troubled by new griefs. She lived just long enough to hear of the tragedy of Mantua, when Hofer, the William Tell of the Tyrol, was shot by command of Napoleon, and of the murder by his orders of the Nuremberg bookseller Palm. She witnessed the enforced flight of "le nomme Stein" when Napoleon con- fiscated the great Minister's estates, and issued instructions that, if taken, he was to be "passe par les armes." The end came in 1810. The cause of her death was a fever, not the broken heart with which some writers have embellished their accounts of her passing away. In her last moments she might well have repeated the great Elector's well-known prayer : " Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor." A canvas, beautiful, but not a trustworthy contemporary pro- duction, shows the Royal model of virtuous maternity in a garden with her two little sons. The younger boy of the picture was destined to be the avenger of his mother's wrongs,—he was the future William I. of Sedan and the Proclamation of Versailles.

Slips such as the statement that the minor coup d'eial of Fructidor was due to "a body of troops" deapatched by Napoleon (who was then occupied in the negotiations for his Treaty of Campio Formio) need not detain us, but we cannot quite excuse a hysteron proteron like the constant use of the word " Germany " when " Prussia " is the word wanted. Miss Moffat labours under a persistent misapprehension, copied, perhaps, from Sir J. Seeley's biography of Stein and sundry German books, of the real nature of the War of Liberation, in which she sees a spontaneous popular move- ment, like the rush to arms in the Ilfasaniello and William Tell of the opera, ranging. from the Baltic to the Alps. No such universal patriotic effervescence aroused the Fatherland. The regular forces wiped out the memories of Jena with a noble devotion, but "the rising of Germany" was almost limited to the formation of Liitzow's "free corps" of three thousand Volunteers, who were mostly Prussians. Napoleon's collapse in 1813 was brought about by the armies of the Fourth Coalition, by his own decadent strategy, and last, though not least, by the inspiration of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the persistent daring of glorious old " Vorwiirts."