season for continuing the intrigue against victims of love and of ambition. Here there is, every minute, a stinging mosquito, and the thistle-seed of beautifully painted trouble flies round far and wide. "There are many women here who are good, and disciples of Linnæus, and their eyes classify men botanically, according to his fine and simple _sexual_-system; they make a great distinction between virtuous and vicious love,--namely, that of _degree_, or at least of time; and the _best_ often speaks on the subject like the _worst_, and the worst like the best. Meanwhile we have here female virtue and manly fidelity, in their way,--but no idea of them can be communicated to a parson; for these two jellies are so soft and delicate, that, if I should undertake to carry them down over all the steps of the throne to the parsonage, they would arrive there in such a spoiled and ruined state, that one would give them down below there the two opposite names,--for which, however, we ourselves have up here our special and corresponding objects. Your commoners would find our elderly men ridiculous in matters of love, as _they_ would your daughters. But what often embitters for me this happy court-life is the universal want of dissimulation. For no one believes here what he hears, and no one thinks how he looks; all must, according to the regular laws of the game, like cards, have the upper side uniform, and put on an external stillness of face as a cover to the internal fire, as the lightning destroys only the sword and not the scabbard. Consequently, as a universal dissimulation is none at all, and as every one gives every other credit for poison, no one can _deceive_ another, but only _outwit_ him; only the understanding, not the heart, is taken in. Meanwhile, to speak the truth, that is not truth; for every one has two masks,--the general and the individual. For the rest, the colors which are used upon the scientific, refined, and philanthropic painting of the outer man are necessarily scraped off from the inner man, but advantageously, since there is not much on the inner man, and the study of appearance lessens reality: so have I often seen hares lying in the woods that had not an ounce of flesh or a drop of fat on their bodies, because all had been absorbed by the monstrous fur which had continued to grow after their death.