The Wendish Princes had a taste for German wives; in which just
taste the Albert genealogy was extremely willing to indulge them.
Affinities produce inheritances; by proper marriage-contracts you
can settle on what side the most contingent inheritance shall at
length fall. Dim but pretty certain lies a time coming when the
Wendish Princes also shall have effaced themselves; and all shall
be German-Brandenburgish, not Wendish any more.--The actual
Inhabitants of Brandenburg, therefore, are either come of Dutch
Bog-farmers, or are simple Lower SAXONS ("Anglo-Saxon," if you
like that better), PLATT-TEUTSCH of the common type; an
unexceptionable breed of people. Streaks of Wendish population,
extruded gradually into the remoter quagmires, and more
inaccessible, less valuable sedgy moors and sea-strands, are
scattered about; Mecklenburg, which still subsists separately
after a sort, is reckoned peculiarly Wendish. In Mecklenburg,
Pommern, Pommerellen (Little Pomerania), are still to be seen
physiognomies of a Wendish or Vandalic type (more of cheek than
there ought to be, and less of brow; otherwise good enough
physiognomies of their kind): but the general mass, tempered with
such admixtures, is of the Platt-Deutsch, Saxon or even Anglish
character we are familiar with here at home. A patient stout
people; meaning considerable things, and very incapable of
speaking what it means.

Albert was a fine tall figure himself; DER SCHONE, "Albert the
Handsome," was his name as often as "Albert the Bear." That latter
epithet he got, not from his looks or qualities, but merely from
his heraldic cognizance: a Bear on his shield. As was then the
mode of names; surnames being scant, and not yet fixedly in
existence. Thus too his contemporaries, Henry THE LION of Saxony