especially down from this date. Some reckon that they had
intermittently been Markgrafs, in their region, long before this;
which is conceivable enough: at all events it is very plain they
did now attain the Office in SALZWEDEL (straightway shifting it
to Brandenburg); and held it continuously, it and much else that
lay adjacent, for centuries, in a highly conspicuous manner.

In Brandenburg they lasted for about two hundred years; in their
Saxon dignities, the younger branch of them did not die out (and
give place to the Wettins that now are) for five hundred. Nay they
have still their representatives on the Earth: Leopold of Anhalt-
Dessau, celebrated "Old Dessauer," come of the junior branches, is
lineal head of the kin in Friedrich Wilhelm's time (while our
little Fritzchen lies asleep in his cradle at Berlin); and a
certain Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, Colonel in the Prussian Army,
authentic PRINCE, but with purse much shorter than pedigree, will
have a Daughter by and by, who will go to Russia, and become
almost too conspicuous, as Catharine II., there!--

"Brandenburg now as afterwards," says one of my old Papers,
"was officially reckoned SAXON; part of the big Duchy of Saxony;
where certain famed BILLUNGS, lineage of an old 'Count Billung'
(connected or not with BILLINGS-gate in our country, I do not
know) had long borne sway. Of which big old Billungs I will say
nothing at all;--this only, that they died out; and a certain
Albert, 'Count of Ascanien and Ballenstadt' (say, of ANHALT, in
modern terms), whose mother was one of their daughters, came in
for the northern part of their inheritance. He made a clutch at
the Southern too, but did not long retain that. Being a man very
swift and very sharp, at once nimble and strong, in the huge