With no relative was she allowed to hold never so brief an interview; and at last even her mother was not permitted to soften by her presence for an hour the rigid and ceremonious captivity of her luckless daughter. Mother and child were allowed to correspond at stated periods, their letters passing open. The princess herself was as much cut off from her own children as if these had been dead and entombed. The little prince and princess were expressly ordered to utterly forget that they had a mother--her very name on their lips would have been condemned as a grievous fault. The boy, George Augustus, was in many points of character similar to his father, and, accordingly, being commanded to forget his mother, he obstinately bore her in memory; and when he was told that he would never have an opportunity afforded him to see her, mentally resolved to make one for himself. It is but justice to the old Elector to say that in his advanced years, when pleasant sins were no longer profitable to him, he gave them up; and when the youngest of his mistresses had ceased to be attractive, he began to think such appendages little worth the hanging on to his Electoral dignity. For, ceasing to love and live with his ‘favourites,’ he did not the more respect, or hold closer intercourse with, his wife --a course about which the Electress Sophia troubled herself very little. Ernest Augustus, when he ceased to be under the influence of the disgraced Countess von Platen, began to be sensible of some sympathy for his daughter-in-law, Sophia. He softened in some degree the rigour of her imprisonment and corresponded with her by letter; a correspondence which inspired her with hope that her freedom might result from it. This hope was, however, frustrated by the death of Ernest Augustus, on the 20th of January 1698. From that time the rigour of her imprisonment was increased fourfold. If the heart of her old father-in-law began to incline towards her as he increased in years, it is not to be wondered at that the heart of her aged father melted towards her as time began to press heavily upon him. But it was the weakest of hearts allied to the weakest of minds. In the comfortlessness of his great age he sought to be comforted by loving her whom he had insanely and unnaturally oppressed --the sole child of his heart and house. In his weakness he addressed himself to that tool of Hanover at Zell, the minister Bernstorf; and that individual so terrified the poor old man by details of the ill consequences which might ensue if the wrath of the new Elector, George Louis, were aroused by the interference of the Duke of Zell in matters which concerned the Elector and his wife, that the old man, feeble in mind and body, yielded, and for a time at least left his daughter to her fate. He thought to compensate for the wrong which he inflicted on her under the impulse of his evil genius, Bernstorf, by adding a codicil to his will.