For the rest, much here is out of joint, and far from satisfactory to him. Seven years ago [1st February, 1705.] he lost his own brave Mother and her love; of which we must speak farther by and by. In her stead he has got a fantastic, melancholic, ill-natured Stepmother, with whom there was never any good to be done; who in fact is now fairly mad, and kept to her own apartments. He has to see here, and say little, a chagrined heart-worn Father flickering painfully amid a scene much filled with expensive futile persons, and their extremely pitiful cabals and mutual rages; scene chiefly of pompous inanity, and the art of solemnly and with great labor doing nothing. Such waste of labor and of means: what can one do but be silent? The other year, Preussen (PRUSSIA Proper, province lying far eastward, out of sight) was sinking under pestilence and black ruin and despair: the Crown-Prince, contrary to wont, broke silence, and begged some dole or subvention for these poor people; but there was nothing to be had. Nothing in the treasury, your Royal Highness:--Preussen will shift for itself; sublime dramaturgy, which we call his Majesty's Government, costs so much! And Preussen, mown away by death, lies much of it vacant ever since; which has completed the Crown-Prince's disgust; and, I believe, did produce some change of ministry, or other ineffectual expedient, on the old Father's part. Upon which the Crown-Prince locks up his thoughts again. He has confused whirlpools, of Court intrigues, ceremonials, and troublesome fantasticalities, to steer amongst; which he much dislikes, no man more; having an eye and heart set on the practical only, and being in mind as in body something of the genus ROBUSTUM, of the genus FEROX withal. He has been wedded six years; lost two children, as we saw; and now again he has two living.