The Press. — London, England, 1858-03-06 00:00:00

acutely many of the mortifications which Miss Atkinson so pathetically laments. When mar riages of convenience were universally recog nised, the coldness of a husband, and his absorption in political duties, could scarcely have caused so much misery as is here repre. sented ; while certainly the tone of morality i n those small German Courts from which the Prussian princes drew their brides must have tendered them tolerably familiar with a lax estimate of wedlock. We cannot therefore suppose that their fate broke upon them with that sudden and overpowering anguish which similar revelations produce under different circumstances. Times are altered now. The life of Courts is purified, and marriages of affection are not deemed incompatible with the highest political interests. The marriage of Queen Victoria, of the Emperors of Austria and France, and the recent auspicious union which has filled two nations with rejoicing, are examples of this happy change. But in the days of which Miss Atkinson treats, a faithful husband was an exception among kings, and domestic happiness an exception among courts. While we admire the womanly sympathy which Miss Atkinson exhibits towards her heroines, we sincerely trust that some of it is superfluous, and that the Queens of Prussia (lid not suffer all that mental and moral agony which a lady of the present day not perhyps unnaturally attributes to them. Considera tions of this nature are exclusively regulated by custom, and the most highly gifted or most virtuous woman suffers no more than the most ignorant or indiscreet from the infidelities of a husband. As none of the Prussian queens were chosen from the great ruling Houses of Europe, they were but littlA mixed up with dynastic quar rels, and their careers are comparatively barren in events of public interest ; but their private life has been depicted by Miss Atkinson with great literary ability, and forms one of the most amusing volumes we have recently met with. The propriety, however, of exhuming all these skeletons of past scandal is more than dubious. No moral lesson is conveyed thereby ; nor are any important passages of history elucidated. The persons and events described may be thought too remote to give any pain to the present generation ; yet one of the principal characters introduced by Miss Atkinson died as lately as 1840, and much of the contents of her volume relates to person ages with whom living men must have been well acquainted. This, however, is a matter of taste. But we shall confine our own quota tions to the earlier portions of Miss Atkin son's work, in which some very diverting anecdotes are scattered up and down. The first Queen of Prussia was a grand daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia, daughter of King James I. She was named Sophia, after he, mother, the Electress of Hanover, upon whom the English crown was settled at' the (Revolution. She was a woman of more than ordinary Dowers of mind and unusually advanced education. She was devoted to literature and philosophy, tabooed card-play ing, corresponded with Leibnitz, and puz zled more than one wise man of the period by the extent of her acquirements. Her husband was not formed to appreciate these sort of attainments. A coldness sprang up between them, and on ono occasion she expressed her sentiments on the subject with the true Stuart wit:—" When Leibnitz had sent her a " Paper upon les infinimcnt petits,' she "is said to have exclaimed, Does ho think ' that the wife of Frederic I. can need a "dissertation upon " infinite littleness."'" Shc, however, as we have said, is little to be pitied in comparison with the ladies who suc ceeded her. The wife of Frederick William I. and mother of Frederick the Great was sub jected to corporal inciignities and physical hardships. She seldom had enough to eat — she was liable to the infliction of the monarch's cane —and on one occasion that puissant prince gave her a black eye and kicked his daughter out of window at the same time. This latter circumstance has been omitted by Nliss Atkinson, but is told with some gusto in Johnson's memoirs of his son. It was indeed this prince who was the principal cause of the paternal ferocity. The future hero hated drill THE PRE S S, MARCH 6, 1858. and uniform, and religion; ho liked books, a French tailor, and suburban gallantries. But he had to pay dear for his tastes. After being " hit about the head on and off for some years," as Captain Cutler might have said, with his father's walking-stick, he was finally immured in the fortress of Custrin, condemned to see one of his comrades suffer death, and a young lady to whom he was attached publicly whipped through the streets. The King's notion of making himself agree- able was scarcely less unpleasant. On the marriage of his daughter to the Prince of Baircuth, we are told—" The King succeeded " very tolerably in his effort to intoxicate the " bridegroom, and performed the further pa " ternal duty of making the bride, when un dressed, kneel down on the floor to repeat the Creed and the Lord's Prayer aloud." He, however, had a great horror of display, of which the Queen, who was a handsome wo man, was rather fond : Sophia Dorothea had a set of very splendid diamonds, which she seldom ventured to wear in the presence of her arbitrary arid displayabhorring lord. She herself, however, had no objection to array her fine person in costly attire, and upon one occasion, during the King's temporary in disposition, she appeared at a birthday ball at Monbijou adorned with these magnificent ornaments. The evening was very gay in the absence of the stern master; the dancing and music were at their height, and the Queen was deeply imersed in her game, when the announcement, " The King is coming," caused a general consternation. The music ceased, the dancing stopped; and the Queen, as she sat, hastily unclasped her jewels and thrust them into her pocket, before the King had time to withdraw his angry gaze from the brilliantly and extravagantly lighted apartment, and perceive them. His passion for " propagating procerity" is well known; and he was always on the look out for individuals adapted to his purpose. The following absurd mistake will remind some of our readers of a similar anecdote re lated of a deceased nobleman of peculiar cele brity : His passion for tall soldiers led him to wish to raise a race of large people, so as to be able to recruit his great regiment without trouble. One day meeting a very tall and well•made village girl in the neighbourhood of Puts dam, he asked her to take a note, which he wrote on the spot, to the captain of his regiment. Either suspecting something, or being in a hurry, the girl gave the note to a little old woman whom she fell in with, and charged her to deliver it as directed. This note contained an order to the captain to have the bearer instantly married to the tallest man in the regiment, whose name was specified. On being acquainted with his fate, and introduced to his bride, the poor young fellow was in despair. He begged and entreated, fell on his knees and wept, but all to no purpose; the King's will was law, and the matrimonial noose was tied. However, the King, on hearing of the ex change of brides that had been made, allowed the marriage to be dissolved. The Queen of Frederick the Great was forced on him against his will, and, according to Johnson, the marriage was never consum mated. The King, however, always treated her with great respect, and required that others should do so too. Hers indeed was a melancholy position ; for she was passionately attached to the husband under whose roof she led the life of a widow, and, with a clqtracter eminently suited to the discharge of domestic duties, was cut off from all the pleasures of maternity. She survived her husband eleven years, dying in 1796, at the age of eighty-one, and to the last was respected and beloved by the Prussian people and all the younger mem bers of her own family, in whose joy and sor rows she was always a sympathising parti cipator. Those who like gossip about the great will find our authoress very entertaining. We have given our readers a sample of her work, and we leave them to form their own opinion. British India, its Races and its History, Con sidered with Reference to the Mutinies of 1857. By John Malcolm Ludlow. Two Vols. Cambridge: Macmillan. India in 1858. A Summary of the Existing Administration, Political, Fiscal, and Judicial, of British Tndia. By Arthur Mills, M.P. With a Revenue Map. London : Murray. TUE twenty-one lectures of which Mr. Lud low's volumes consist are an expansion of a course delivered by hint last year to the 233 students of the Working-men's College. They make no pretensions to Oriental learning, but are compiled from such authorities as the works of Elphinstone, Mill, Wilson, Hough, Macaulay, Kaye, Rickards, and Mrs. Speir ; and profess "to teach nothing to those who know " India, but only a little to those who do not." The work falls into three divisions ; the first five lectures treating of the soil and the races of India, the eleven succeeding ones of the history of our dominion, and the remainder, of the present crisis, its lessons and its re 'lndies. The author, as might be conjectured from his names, is Anglo-Indian by connection, and has had numerous opportunities of form ing an opinion on Indian matters before com ►nencing his studies for the present work. His reading appears to have been wide, his style is terse and effective, and the whole work, though onesided in its bias, is evidently written by one who has done his best to keep his judgment cool and impartial under cir cumstances which make either quality very difficult of attainment. It reads, perhaps, less freshly than Miss Martineau's brilliant sketch, but contains more information, being more closely packed, as well as of far greater length. Its arrangement is more methodical, and its general aspect is that of greater carefulness and elaboration. Of the first five lectures we are able to speak very highly ; not that their materials are altogether new, but that they are presented in a more compendious and readable form than is usually met with. The following analogy between Asia. and Europe has not, we think, been previously pointed out : The best idea I can give you of India's place in the world, i 3 by saying that India is the Italy of Asia,—the jewel of that continent, as Italy is of this; an Italy, on a large scale of course, answering to that of the Asiatic con- tinent itself, as compared with Europe. The stupendous wall of the Himalayas shuts it out from the cold of the north, in the same way as the comparatively low boundary fence of the Alps defends our European Italy. The Indus, indeed, flowing from the Himalayas southward and forming the western boundary of India, may seem to vary the analogy. Bat if the Rhone, instead of falling to the west of the Alps, found its way from the Lake of Geneva southward through one of the valleys of Savoy, that analogy would be once more complete, and the mountain chains of Afghanistan wnuld, be seen to correspond exactly to the western Alps. Only by recognising this analogy can we understand how Herat should be reckoned the key of India. Again, the Ganges, with its many feeders, pouring down from the Himalayas into an eastward sea, forms within it, as its miniature, the Po, does in Northern Italy, a basin of un rivalled extent and fertility, and marked out at its lower end as one of the special seats of a cultivation which is also in Europe characteristic of the basin of the Po--that, namely, of rice, the main food of the inhabitants of Bengal ; the Burrampooter accompanying it to the north, much as the Adige does the Po. The sudden narrowing of the Italian peninsula, the long chain of the Apennines which divides it, may appear to you to hinder further resemblance. It is not so in reality. The whole central portion of the Indian peninsula may be said to be one Apennine. These two mountain ridges, which in our maps seem to rise from en even plain on both aides, are in fact only the supports of that tableland of the Deckan of which I spoke-1,500 feet above the aea level—and form with it consequently, as compared with the lowlands of the coast, only one immense bill. To the south, lastly, the magni ficent island of Ceylon, detached from the mainland before history began, stands in the same relation to India as Sicily to Italy. If we pass from physical to historical resemblance, we shall be surprised to find how close the parallel holds.' As in Europe, Italy has always been the land of promise of the northern barbarian, so has India been in Asia. Although its northern barmier is well-nigh impassable to armies, it is accessible from the north-east, from the northwest, and from the west; and as the German and tho enchnian have contended with each other in cessantly for the one, so have the Afghan, the Tartar, the Persian for the other. Four " strata " of inhabitants are described as forming the population. First come the aboriginal tribes, to whose ancestors are pro bably to be ascribed the Cyclopean remains and ancient roads found in remote parts of the pen insula. They practise xicarions human sacri fices, and their worship i 8 like a horrible parody of Christianity. Their origin was probably Scythian, and the black blood of Hindostan is derived from their intermixture. They have never given up the idea that they are the real owners of the soil. Next come the Hindoos, whose fair complexion, once white as that of Europeans, betrays their northern origin. Their religion, unlike that of the Greeks, Romans, and Indian aborigines, which was Landed down by ceremonies, has the vitality derivable from its preservation by %written records. Their chief characteristics are their organised polytheism, their division into I