taining together about four hundred thousand souls,
had lately been united under the government of
Margrave Charles Alexander. Neither land had been
fortunate in its previous sovereign. Both countries had
belonged to branches of the great Hohenzollern
family, the main line of which had already laid in Prussia
the foundations of that power which has given it
to-day the foremost place in Europe. But the
Margraves of Anspach and of Bayreuth lacked the ability
which underlay the roughness of King Frederick William,
father of Frederick the Great. Of this Frederick
William we have a lively picture in the memoirs of his
daughter Wilhelmina. How he chased his children
about the room with his stick, how Wilhelmina hid
under the bed and Frederick in the closet, how the
king loved tall soldiers and bullied his wife are there
graphically narrated. With the express object of making
her story more cheerful, the princess tells how her
father, in general the most chaste of monarchs, tried to
kiss a lady of honor on the stairs, and how she struck
him in the face and made his nose bleed. This
Wilhelmina married a Margrave of Bayreuth, and her sister,
Frederika Louisa, married a Margrave of Anspach, but
did not live on good terms with him.
This Margrave of Anspach was good-natured, in his way, and kindly, when not out of temper. He liked to do small favors to his servants, and to inform these of them with his own lips. He gladly allowed dainties to be sent to the sick from his kitchen. When not in liquor, he was inclined to commute the death penalty to criminals in civil life, unless they had been guilty of such heinous offences as persuading his soldiers to
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