These two persons could have said this and more to one another in complete or comparative safety. To write such things down, and to preserve what was written, was madness, fatal to life and honour if discovered. But if these, and much worse, were not written down by some one, how could Sophia Dorothea be made infamous for ever in the eyes of posterity? One can only judge of the bushel by the sample; and of the whole correspondence, which is now in the library of the University of Lund, by the fragmentary extracts which have been made public. If two persons, knowing they were watched, and their letters detained, could write such fiercely ardent assurances of mutual love, express such utter contempt for the consequences of discovery, and explain to one another how they were tracked and betrayed, they must have been hopelessly insane. An enemy would bend invention to such course as the one best calculated to destroy those against whom it was directed. But there is one point which seems conclusive against the genuineness of this correspondence. There are passages in the alleged letters of Königsmark to the princess which no man, however devoid of every manly quality, would write to a woman whom he loved--would write to any woman at all. These passages not even the most utterly and irretrievably abandoned of women would be able to read without sense of insult and outrage even to such soiled and shattered womanhood as hers. A man writing such things, supposing they were intelligible to the person addressed, would in that person’s eyes be loathsome and execrable for ever.