have looked not otherwise.

The Princess Amalia Seraphina, a daughter of the Grand-Ducal house
of Toggenburg-Tannhauser, would be equally inconsiderable if she
were not a cutting instrument in the hands of an ambitious man. She
is much younger than the Prince, a girl of two-and-twenty, sick with
vanity, superficially clever, and fundamentally a fool. She has a
red-brown rolling eye, too large for her face, and with sparks of
both levity and ferocity; her forehead is high and narrow, her
figure thin and a little stooping. Her manners, her conversation,
which she interlards with French, her very tastes and ambitions, are
alike assumed; and the assumption is ungracefully apparent: Hoyden
playing Cleopatra. I should judge her to be incapable of truth. In
private life a girl of this description embroils the peace of
families, walks attended by a troop of scowling swains, and passes,
once at least, through the divorce court; it is a common and, except
to the cynic, an uninteresting type. On the throne, however, and in
the hands of a man like Gondremark, she may become the authoress of
serious public evils.

Gondremark, the true ruler of this unfortunate country, is a more
complex study. His position in Grunewald, to which he is a
foreigner, is eminently false; and that he should maintain it as he
does, a very miracle of impudence and dexterity. His speech, his
face, his policy, are all double: heads and tails. Which of the two
extremes may be his actual design he were a bold man who should
offer to decide. Yet I will hazard the guess that he follows both
experimentally, and awaits, at the hand of destiny, one of those
directing hints of which she is so lavish to the wise.