transpiring, or sluttishly bubbling up, in poor benighted rotten
Europe here or there;--since these are sufficient to date the
Transaction for us; and what does not stick to our Fritz and his
affairs it is more pleasant to us to forget than to remember, of
such an epoch.

Hereby, for the present, is a great load rolled from Queen Sophie
Dorothee's heart. One, and, that the highest, of her abstruse
negotiations, cherished, labored in, these fourteen years, she has
brought to a victorious issue,--has she not? Her poor Mother, once
so radiant, now so dim and angry, shut in the Castle of Ahlden,
does not approve this Double-Marriage; not she for her part;--as
indeed evil to all Hanoverian interests is now chiefly her good,
poor Lady; and she is growing more and more of a Megaera every
day. With whom Sophie Dorothee has her own difficulties and
abstruse practices; but struggles always to maintain, under
seven-fold secrecy, some thread of correspondence and pious
filial ministration wherever possible; that the poor exasperated
Mother, wretchedest and angriest of women, be not quite cut off
from the kinship of the living, but that some soft breath of pity
may cool her burning heart now and then. [In Memoirs of
Sophia Dorothea (London, 1845), ii. 385, 393, are
certain fractions of this Correspondence, "edited" in an amazing
manner.] A dark tragedy of Sophie's, this; the Bluebeard Chamber
of her mind, into which no eye but her own must ever look.


PRINCESS AMELIA COMES INTO THE WORLD.

In reference to Queen Sophie, and chronologically if not otherwise