greed, of his own astucities and stealthy audacities. Of which we
shall hear more than enough by and by.


OF THE DESSAUER, NOT YET "OLD."

As to the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, rugged man, whose very face is
the color of gunpowder, he also knows French, and can even write
in it, if he like,--having duly had a Tutor of that nation, and
strange adventures with him on the grand tour and elsewhere;--but
does not much practise writing, when it can be helped.
His children, I have heard, he expressly did not teach to read or
write, seeing no benefit in that effeminate art, but left them to
pick it up as they could. His Princess, all rightly ennobled now,
--whom he would not but marry, though sent on the grand tour to
avoid it,--was the daughter of one Fos an Apothecary at Dessau;
and is still a beautiful and prudent kind of woman, who seems to
suit him well enough, no worse than if she had been born a
Princess. Much talk has been of her, in princely and other
circles; nor is his marriage the only strange thing Leopold has
done. He is a man to keep the world's tongue wagging, not too
musically always; though himself of very unvocal nature.
Perhaps the biggest mass of inarticulate human vitality, certainly
one of the biggest, then going about in the world. A man of vast
dumb faculty; dumb, but fertile, deep; no end of ingenuities in
the rough head of him:--as much mother-wit, there, I often guess,
as could be found in whole talking parliaments, spouting
themselves away in vocables and eloquent wind!

A man of dreadful impetuosity withal. Set upon his will as the one