No. IV. Brant OF me Quocn's GRANIOON.—Her Majesty's Mother—The line

of Fredericks—Prederick the Great—Charles Augustus of Weimar and his Duchess —The Prince Regent of Prussia, his joy, and his extempore dancing—Augustus La Fontaine—.Fine Passage from a Prussian newspaper respecting cannon and the electric telegraph—Present intellectual state of the British press.

A LOYAL and loving subject, with choice of some particular topic before him, cannot but join this week in the universal congratulation on the birth of a grandson to the Queen.

And the world have not yet been accustomed enough to the electric telegraph, to lose the delight of wondering at the quickness of the commu- nication. At half-past three the birth takes place in Berlin ; five minutes afterwards the news is sent off to Windsor; in ten minutes more it arrives; and in five-and-twenty minutes further, congratulations from Windsor "are in the hands of the young mother and her husband!" What anxiety relieved! what felicity speeded! Anybody who knows what parents feel on such occasions, how the strongest become thoughtful, how the sensitive become girded with very bodily soreness as with a wound, must bless the magic discovery, which has turned weeks into moments, and to dream of which would have been regarded by our an- cestors as a madness. The modest wish of the poet, who only begged that the gods would "annihilate space and time" and "make two lovers happy," has been realized with what (profanity apart) might be looked upon as an almost playful mixture of assent and omnipotence, as though the heavens Condescended to be pleasant with us ; and thus not only two, but two's upon two's of hundreds of lovers, and parents, and children, are blessed beyond the wildest and most ridiculous hopes which they could have entertained a few years ago ! What is to come next ?

But a grandson to the Queen ! to a lady but just going for forty, who still looks so young on her coins, and who remains so in the hearts of her people. And the good Duchess of Kent, for whose training of her daughter the nation is ever grateful, and who was herself a mother at eighteen (of the Prince of Leiningen) is now a great-grandmother, and may live to add great to great. May she do so ; and hear another of her waltzes ,(notes struck out of a tasteful and cheerful mind,) performed at the birth of a Duke of Cornwall (the title—is it not? of the eldest born of a Prince of Wales,) or of a new Frederick of Prussia, son of the now new Frederick, and destined to be the eleventh Frederick of his race in succession, with the addition it is to be presumed, of Victor and Albert For since the prosperity of the first Frederick of Prussia, who was styled the ." Great Elector" and who reigned for nearly fifty years in the seventeenth century, all his heirs to the throne have been Fredericks, chiefly no doubt by reason of the exploits of King Frederick the Second, called the Great, who insomuch as he was a great soldier, and a foe to intolerance in religion, deserved the title. His cruel usage of Trenck and others, his capricious manners towards his dependents as deleribed by his abject secretary Thiebault, and the ragouts that subjugated him in his latter days in spite of all that his :physician Zimmerman could say or do, proving themselves veritable conquerors of the conqueror, do not show him in lights equally magnanimous ; and it is to be hoped the new Prince will be taught to understand him thoroughly, and not to consider the family so dependent for its lustre as it is supposed to be on the fame of a single man. The infant inherits nothing direct from him but his name ; for Frederick had no children. Let us trust that his grandfather will begin a new day for him, which his father will continue ; for besides the congenial intellect on the.mother's side, he has ancestors in another direction on the father's, of which any family might be proud ; namely, the Grand-Ducal race of Weimar. His father, Prince Frederick Wil- liam, is the great-grandson of Charles-Augustus of Weimar, the friend of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, Herder, and others, Germany's greatest wri- ters, and husband to the excellent Grand Duchess Louise, whom Napoleon is said to have pronounced "the most sensible woman he ever met with." It was she, who when the conqueror of Germany, in his anger, asked how the Duke her husband had dared to join with Prussia against him, answered, "By the same rule that would have influenced his Ma- jesty under the like circumstances,—the siding with the weaker power, and with the friend in adversity." The conqueror found this noble piece of flattery irresistible.

The infant's paternal grandfather, the Prince Regent of Prussia, who appears to have thought it necessary to hold a kind of formal and ultra-conservative front to the occasional vagaries in a progressive di- rection of his otherwise despotic brother the King, and who still shows that he himself will not move too fast, though decidedly moving onward, no sooner possessed any power of his own as director of affairs, than he made a present to a university of the busts of the four most popular and advanced German philosophers; and the enthusiastic, over-flowing, and,

so to speak, all-social joy, which he has manifested on the occasion of this birth, pouring forth his feelings to all who come, and giving the con- gratulations of the humblest as good as they bring, augurs well for what has been said of his zeal to consolidate the interests of the Protestant houses in Europe, and thus secure constitutionalism, and the sure though not hurried progression of all which English or German philosophy can alike desire. He behaves entirely on this occasion, like a man and a gentleman. He allows his joy to be seen great, because it is so. He will not suffer state-congratulations to be made him as Prince Regent, because that might look like hailing him as the originator of a new line at the expense of his brother's hopes ; but he will freely take all that can be given him privately, as the father of the child's father, and the kins- man, now by blood, of its house. Finally, to show what a sensible man he is as regards dancing, agreeably to what has been said on that subject by Walter Scott and others in certain papers, a ball is improvised on the very evening of the birth, invitations to which are sent about by word of mouth, in the most unceremonious manner conceivable, and half the Parliament come and dance, some of them perhaps in their Bluchers, if not in their boots, to show the heartiness of the thing ; that is to say, there is no ball at all, but a veritable extempore family-dance got up on the instant—for themselves and friends, to show how happy they all are ; and the Regent himself is one of the dancers in quality of grandfather ground young again, though it seems dancing is not his forte, and he does not profess it; only, on this occasion, dance he must and will ; and every young as well as old woman loves him, and hopes he will put her out. (For then there is a pleasant word, and an apology ; and she bows, and blushes, and curtseys all at once, with a face of consummate pleasure and gratitude.) Nor must it be forgotten, that in the servant's hall wine is allowed "at discretion"; and depend upon it dance is flowing with the wine, in imitation of what is going forward up-stairs ; and the butler, very stately and condescending, thinks he is dancing in the manner of the Regent.

To crown all, or rather to have set all properly going from the first,— for without it the rest would have languished,—nothing can have been more satisfactory than the bulletins respecting the mother; and the child is a child to match ; "as lusty a young recruit," said old Field-marshal von Wrangel, "as you could wish to see."

This is in the style of Augustus La Fontaine, the Prussian novelist and army-chaplain; a kind of Uncle Toby of a writer, all for love, and old-soldiership and family benevolence. But thereby, now-a-days, hangs a rebuke ; and this rebuke, strange and auspicious to say, has been given with equal force and beauty, and with a freedom singularly unlike what used to be permitted in the great barrack-house, not long since known as Prussia, in one of the newspapers of that country itself—the Mks- zeitung . Here it is.

"H the position of a Prince destined to become the head of a rising com- monweath renders it desirable that, once attained to man's estate, he should be capable of discerning the vast difference existing between the various periods of human history ; then we wish to this child that, when arrived to years of maturity, he may be induced to compare the several characteristics inherent to the nature of those two heralds announcing his birth a few hours ago to the inhabitants of Berlin and the populations of Europe at large. We allude to the cannon and the telegraph, the mighty agents bear- ing the news of the joyful event far and wide all over the Continent. Which of these two heralds will the youthful Prince hereafter patronize and choose as the symbol of his reign? "Long before the Berliners, by counting the number of the discharges, were informed of the sex of the infant, the telegraph had transmitted its direct and explicit announcement to the inhabitants of whole provinces and countries. It was only a wordless sound the cannon gave forth—an un- meaning noise, dependent, as to its interpretation on previous agreement.

The telegraph, on the contrary, conveyed the intelligence in words endowed with the power of imparting a direct communication to the human mind. The telegraph, in fact, spoke as man to man. "No two symbols, perhaps, are more appropriate to mark the diversity of heterogeneous eras in human history than the cannon and the telegraph ; the cannon, an instrument of power, once conquering the world, to prepare it for a nobler sort of rule and domination ; the telegraph, an agent of that intellectual superiority ordained to found, hereafter, an empire comprising the whole of the universe within its limits ; the cannon, an instrument of destruction, assisting the nations of the earth when waging bloody strife against each other ; the telegraph, a medium of rise and progress, connect-

ingi distant peoples for purposes of common labour. • * •

"We sincerely desire to see the child grow up and be made fully to ap- preciate the character of his own, the character of modern times. May he become deeply aware of the immense superiority of this and future ages over days gone 'by! May he comprehend the truth, that this century, as much

exceeds the worth of the past, as the rapidity of the telegraph widely sur- passes the stupid roar of the iron muzzle ! May he, ripened to intellectual

virility, understand how mean and insignificant is the effect of mere bom- bastic noise, but that quiet meditative thoughts have power to move the world! If this be the case, the Prince will hereafter be said to possess sufficient capacities for the proper fulfilment of his lofty vocation ; and it may then be fairly presumed that he will prefer officiating in the service of. mind to ruling under the auspices of violence and terror."

I am indebted for this extract, as well as for the birthday particulars

on which the present article has been founded, to the columns of the Daily Telegraph, whose continental correspondence is as full of amuse- ment as information. The illustration of the two different epochs, coming so closely also as they do together, is every way striking and happy, and may not be without practical European service at this mo- ment, when many are expecting to see the armed hands of monarchies rising up, prepared to fall on one another. The whole passage would have been worthy of the best moments of a British newspaper editor- ship, and this is no mean compliment ; for without flattery, much less self-complacency in a writer who has had so little for many years to do with it ; lwhat a periodical press does not the United Kingdom possess now, and of what importance is it not felt to be to Europe itself; check- ing absolute monarchies, and encouraging the rational advance of peo- ples! The journal at its head is full of unquestionable statesmanship and the most masterly writing ; subject as it is occasionally to caprices of self-will common to the sense of power, as in what it said the other day respecting Burns's commemoration and Scotch nationality. A penny daily press has started up, absolutely competing with that journal in reading and eloquence, as well as news, though there is a youthful tendency to excess in the display of its acquirements, to which pruning might be of advantage. And in the rest of the greater portion of our periodical literature, day, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, never at any time during its existence was there anything like the mass of intel- lectual power which it exhibits. \ As to myself, whom the privilege usually conceded by the younger and stronger to the assumptions of old age (if not malevolent) must excuse for my thus speaking of others, much more in ob- jection, I do but profess to bring to the vast amount already existing the small additional stock of reflexion and amusement which the experience of a long life may have given me ; and if an unalterable semi-tropical tem- perament induces me to wish to move forward a little quicker in some re- spects, that same experience would give me reason indeed to be ashamed of my pretensions, if I did not know how to recognize and to respect the conscientiousness which no less may induce others to move slowly. The world somehow or other progresses at any late ; and doubtless it does so towards its intellectual and moral portion of the same great and good end towards which, in its planetary character, it is travelling in company with its mighty leader, the sun ; otherwise it would be stopped by the same Divine Cause, which has sent it rolling and gathering knowledge through the mysteries of time and space.