The Express.
London, England, 1858-03-06 00:00:00

LITEIiATURIL

1114101/8 of the Quinn of Prussia. By Emma
zusaaa ATKINSON. London : W. Kent and Co.

" A saint in crape is twice • saint in lawn.;
woman beautiful, virtuous, fascinating, becomes
increasingly so the higher is her social rank. When
the beggar maid became a queen, courtiers saw in
her charms the existence of which at one time they
would undoubtedly have denied. Would Burke have
surprised himself in expatiating on the wrongs of
Marie hoteinette—would he have made all Europe
ring with there " ten thousand swords leaping from
their Hibbard, to avenge even a look that menaced
her with insult," had she been other than an em-
Peres dirXter and a royal bride ? Who loves not
virtue is • P Perhaps as kings and queenseet the
fashion, itip well it should be so. Poor motives fee
good aolieles are better than none. Our author at
any rats Jokes this amiable view, and determines
that, milieu she is concerned, the Queens of Prussia.
if they de good by stealth, shall not blush to find it
fame. Mier book also makes its appearance at a
season time, just as England has bestowed the
eldest of her daughters upon the Prussian Crown
Prince. Yet Miss Atkinson has not written hur-
riedly ; as the contrary, she has done her work are-
fall well. Dnoa
collecting
residence
material,of some;.orit duration
n she was
• of contempor ryy authors and the
of foreign am and she has the
rare art of rightly using these atom; she has
made enough out of the materials before her, and
not too much. She might have put together a
much bigger book, but we are glad ehe dui not, as
the tale of court intrigues and sandals; of the
license of kings and the virtues of queens ; of the
servility of courtiers and the arrogance of favour-
ites, is tedious and not instructive. We tire also of
the names, which are fearfully monotonous. We
can scarce tell one Prince Frederick William from
another; and Sophia does not become more attrae-
tire from the fact that, with a paucity of invention
quite regal, it seems to have been the Christian name
of almost every other Prussian princess. One of the
leading personages in Miss Atkinson's volume is
Sophia Cluirlotte, the philosophical Queen, the
friend of Liebnitz, who dying exclaimed, "Do
not pity sic, I am about to satisfy my curiosity
upon the causes of things which Liebnitz never
could explain to me; and I shall provide the Bing
the spectacle of a funeral procession which will give
him occasion to diaSaall his imaginable magni-
ficence." Another is Louisa, of whom Napoleon
said she was the most beautiful woman he had ever
seen—a beauty, however, which pleaded in vain for
Prussia with the man of the iron will and the evil
star. The other figures are those of the ascetic Sophia
Louisa; Sophia Dorothea, sister of our English
George I. ' • Elizabeth Christina, of whom Thitbault
tells us that she fulfilled the conditions Cesar re-
quired in his wife, that she should afford no occa-
sion to be spoken of; and Frederica Louisa, who as
the daughter of one of the few women Frederick
the Great esteemed, was raised to the honour of
being one of the four living wives of his nephew.
Yet the nephew was not a Turk, Prussia was not
a country where polygamy was recognised by law,
and Mormonism had not then been dreamt of. In
a very rapid sketch of the Electresees of Brandenburg
the reader is provided with all the necessary pre-
liminary information as to the Prussian Court and
people. The conclusion we come to is that the lot
has f•'

fallen to our English Princess in happier times.
For her sake we have no desire to recall the past.
We are quite content to read it as it is spread out
before us in Miss Atkinson's chronicle. What hard
times the first Queen had is clear, from the following
sketch of