only of its weakness. But where was the bridegroom? Miles and miles away. The royal lover woos by an envoy and wins by a treaty. In his place, his ambassador stood forth—an aged noble man, who, having spent a whole life in the observance of forms, held them to be the highest attributes of human nature.
The ceremony proceeded, and, at its close, the ambassador dropped on his knee and kissed the hand of the Duchess of Parma. Josepha turned, and would have knelt to her mother, but this the empress prevented, and, folding her in her arms, pressed her lips to her brow, and wished her many years of happiness. Very ungracefully, but very affectionately, the emperor pressed forward; by this time he had forgotten all the advantages of the alliance, and every thing but that he was about to lose his favourite child. Maria Theresa evidently endured this display very impatiently; her husband met her eye, and—with that species of experience which must be peculiarly adapted to fools, for it is they who are said to learn by it—read its meaning, and shrunk back into silence and himself. The Marquis di Placentia now gave a signal to an attendant, and a page stepped forward with a casket; its contents the ambassador again knelt to offer to his new sovereign. It was the portrait of the Duke of Parma, fastened to a chain of brilliants. The
