According to Johnson, who says that quotation is the watchword of literary men, he was a literary man, for he had ever ready a magazine of citations adapted to all purposes. The variety was some warrant of wide reading; and the Prince was, at all events, not like Pozzo di Borgo, who made the same triad of quotations endure a three-months’ duty. At the side of the Prince’s little bed, in the very least of libraries, his little commonplace book, on an almost invisible desk, received the brief record of ideas that visited his gossamer brain. All around this room were strewn, in most admired disorder, a mountain of manuscripts, and a wilderness of works on love, philosophy, poetry, and war. Amidst this mass, the old Prince would leap about with the agility of a monkey. Fatigue he never acknowledged, and sleep he little cared for. He would sit up whole nights, half a week through, to read dry works on strategy; and then fall asleep over erotic songs, of which he commenced many, and finished few. Those that he did terminate have as little of the echo of nature as Watteau’s shepherdesses have of its aspect. One of the most innocent of his pursuits was to attend at the Opera, and applaud Frederic Venua’s pretty music to the pretty ballet of ‘Flore et Zéphyre.’ The once young leader of fashion would not lay down his sceptre when he grew old; and as an octogenarian he played, in the eyes of Vienna, an airier “ci-devant jeune homme” than was ever conceived or executed by the inimitable Potier. He could be a boy with the boys; and the old gentleman played heartily at soldiers with the little King of Rome, before that shadow of a monarch grew up to welcome those other favourites, one of whom especially was as fatal to him as the Fornarina to the gifted Raphael. But the Prince loved to be with young men, and to be thought of by them; and did not love to be reminded either of old-age or of death. His little summer residence at the Kalemberg was the locality whence Sobieski departed to save Austria from the infidel, and to earn for it, what Austria has ever paid to her benefactors, eternal ingratitude. The spirit of the heroic no longer resided there at the period of which I am treating. The walls of the house were covered with the portraits of ladies whose hearts, or what they called such, had yielded to the assaults of De Ligne; and above the portal was inscribed this motto of mingled impiety, mendacity, and impudence:— “Sans remords, sans regret, sans crainte, sans envie.”