This tempting invitation swept away my uncertainties like cobwebs. My theatrical experience little exceeded a few acted charades, but I had always been a great playgoer, and had long frequented a school of elocution, where I had acquired readiness of delivery, and the habit of speaking before a numerous audience. So I doubted not of making at least a respectable appearance upon the boards of the palace theatre. I had no reason to complain of the part assigned to me, for it was to be rewarded upon the stage with the hand of a beautiful baroness. Like more than one pious congregation, I thought the Klein-Fleckenbergers were in distress for a good parson, and doubtless I might pass muster as a tolerable one. It was no small stimulus to me to accept the part and do my best, that I should thereby be giving pleasure to her who I felt assured would be at once the most illustrious and the most lovely of my audience. And since the court persisted in discerning in me, an undisguised and unassuming private gentleman, a distinguished Incognito, whose mask, however, it carefully abstained from plucking off, I made up my mind there was no harm in letting the mistake go a stage further. Kotzebue's agreeable play of the Love Child (_Das Kind der Liebe_) has, I think, appeared in an English dress, and will be known to many. I need here refer but to a small portion of the plot. Baron Wildenhain, a wealthy nobleman, destines the hand of his beautiful and artless daughter, Amelia, to Count Von der Mulde, a Frenchified German and empty coxcomb, but in other respects an advantageous match. Unwilling, however, to bestow her hand upon one to whom she may be unable to give her heart, he commissions Ehrmann, a clergyman, who has been her tutor, to ascertain her feelings towards the count, and to warn her against accepting him as a companion for life if she is unable to love and esteem him. Ehrmann, who has long been secretly attached to Amelia, but has scrupulously concealed his passion, magnanimously accepts the difficult and delicate mission; but whilst accomplishing it, and explaining to his former pupil the indispensable conditions of conjugal happiness, he is at once surprised, pained, and overjoyed by her _naive_ confession that the sentiments of esteem and affection he tells her she ought to entertain towards her future husband, are exactly those she experiences for himself. This scene is skilfully managed, and a happy _dénouement_ is brought about by the baron's preferring his daughter's happiness to his own pride, and giving her to the humbly-born but accomplished and virtuous minister.