The Dowager Duchess Amelia was a vivacious, pleasure-loving, singularly intelligent, and liberal-minded woman, who had governed the duchy during her son’s minority admirably, and made allies for herself among the best German intellects. Thanks to her, her son Karl August had been so trained, that, in the midst of a court circle to which the light of the eighteenth century had barely penetrated, he showed a most manly contempt for the ideals of mistresses of the robes and silver sticks in waiting, and swept all such fripperies away to become the dearest friend of Goethe. His duchess (whose courage both extorted Napoleon’s admiration and saved her husband from further proofs of his ire) was a woman of grand character, and as great a contrast, except in what was really best in both of them, to her lively mother-in-law as could well be imagined. She insisted on the most uncompromising observance of etiquette, and wore to the last day of her life the costume which had prevailed in the years when she was young. Of this remarkable trio of exalted personages it was the reigning duchess whom Madame de Staël selected for her friend. Indeed, she never mentions the Dowager Duchess in corresponding with the daughter-in-law, and in her _Allemagne_ dismisses the Grand Duke with a few lines, in which she alludes to his military talents and speaks of his conversation as _piquante_ and thoughtful. From Weimar, Madame de Staël went to Berlin, with letters from their highnesses of the little court to the lovely and charming Queen Louise. In a well-known letter to the Grand Duchess (the first of their long correspondence), she records a _fête_ which took place immediately after her arrival. It was a masquerade representing Alexander’s return to Babylon; and the beautiful queen, of whom Madame de Staël is lost in admiration, danced in it herself. To this pageant succeeded various costume quadrilles, in which Kotzebue appeared as a priest of Mercury, poppy crowned, caduceus in hand, and so ugly and awkward, that Madame de Staël wonders why her imagination was not irretrievably ruined by the sight of him. One likes to think of her at this court in the midst of such famous and distinguished people; the personages so outwardly brilliant, so inwardly dull, who surrounded her having vanished down the gulfs of Time, her own unique personality stands out vividly against the picturesque but confused background reconstructed by our fancy. At Berlin she first saw and liked August Wilhelm Schlegel, destined later to be so unwelcome to Sismondi, Bonstetten, and her other friends at Coppet. She succumbed at once to the varied attractions of his colossal learning, his surprising linguistic accomplishments, and his great conversational powers. She felt that here was a foeman worthy of her steel, and she magnanimously overlooked his acerbity, his pedantry and vanity. She had indeed a royal indifference to the defects of great minds. It was only the greatness she cared for.