The duke’s prejudice, however, was rather stubborn of character, and he was guilty of many absurdities to show, as he thought, that his obstinacy of ill-merited feeling against his own child was not ill-founded. He refused to listen to her own statement of her wrongs, in order to show how he guarded himself against being unduly biassed. The mother of the princess remained her firmest friend and truest champion. If misrepresentations had shaken her confidence for a moment, it was _only_ for a moment. She knew the disposition of Sophia Dorothea too well to lend credit to false representations which depicted her as a wife, compared with whom Petruchio’s Katherine would have been the gentlest of Griseldas. As little did she believe--and to the expression of her disbelief she gave much indignant force of phrase--as little did she believe in the suggestions of the ministers of the Elector that the familiar terms which, as they alleged, existed between the Electoral Princess and Count Königsmark were such as did wrong to her husband George Louis. Those judges of morality had jumped to the conclusion that youth and good looks were incompatible with propriety of conduct. The worst that could have been alleged against Sophia Dorothea at this period was, that some letters had passed between her and Count Königsmark, and that the latter had once or twice had private audience of the Electoral Princess. Whatever may be thought of such things here in England, and in the present age, they have never been accounted of in Germany but as common-place circumstances, involving neither blame nor injury. A correspondence between two persons of the respective ranks of the Electoral Princess and the count was not an uncommon occurrence; save that it was not often that two such persons had either the taste or capacity to maintain such intercourse. As to an occasional interview, such a favour, granted by ladies of rank to clever conversational men, was as common an event as any throughout the empire; and as harmless as the interviews of Leonora and that very selfish personage, the poet Tasso. The simple fact appears to have been that, out of a very small imprudence--if imprudence it may be called--the enemies of Sophia Dorothea contrived to rear a structure which should threaten her with ruin. Her exemplary husband, who affected to hold himself wronged by the alleged course adopted by his consort, had abandoned her, in the worst sense of that word. He had never, in absence, made her hours glad by letters, whose every word is dew to a soul athirst for assurances of even simple esteem. In his own household his conversation was seldom or never addressed to his wife; and, when it was, never to enlighten, raise, or cheer her. She _may_ have conversed and corresponded with Königsmark, but no society _then_ construed such conversation and correspondence as crimes; and even had they approached in this case to a limit which would have