Excellenz Seckendorf, whom Friedrich Wilhelm so loves, is by no means a beautiful man; far the reverse. Bodily,--and the spirit corresponds,--a stiff-backed, petrified, stony, inscrutable-looking, and most unbeautiful old Intriguer. Portraits of him, which are frequent, tell all one story. The brow puckered together, in a wide web of wrinkles from each temple, as if it meant to hide the bad pair of eyes, which look suspicion; inquiry, apprehension, habit of double-distilled mendacity; the indeterminate projecting chin, with its thick, chapped under-lip, is shaken out, or shoved out, in mill-hopper fashion,--as if to swallow anything there may be, spoken thing or other, and grind it to profitable meal for itself. Spiritually he was an old Soldier let for hire; an old Intriguer, Liar, Fighter, what you like. What we may call a human Soul standing like a hackney-coach, this half-century past, with head, tongue, heart, conscience, at the hest of a discerning public and its shilling. There is considerable faculty, a certain stiff-necked strength in the old fellow; in fact, nature had been rather kind to him; and certainly his Uncle and Guardian--the distinguished Seckendorf who did the HISTORIA LUTHERANISMI, a RITTER, and man of good mark, in Ernst THE PIOUS of Saxe-Gotha's time--took pains about his education. But Nature's gifts have not prospered with him: how could they, in that hackney-coach way of life? Considerable gifts, we say; shrunk into a strange bankruptcy in the development of them. A stiff-backed, close-fisted old gentleman, with mill-hopper chin,--with puckery much-inquiring eyes, which have never discovered any noble path for him in this world. He is a strictly orthodox Protestant; zealous about external points of moral conduct; yet scruples not, for the Kaiser's shilling, to lie with energy to all lengths; and fight, according to the Reichs-Hofrath code, for any god or man. He is gone mostly to avarice, in these mature years; all his various strengths turned into strength of grasping. He is now fifty-four; a man public in the world, especially since he became the Kaiser's man: but he has served various masters, in various capacities, and been in many wars;--and for the next thirty years we shall still occasionally meet him, seldom to our advantage.