There is a certain quaint charm, an individuality, about the old German towns that once upon a time, in days which are after all not so very remote, were the seats of small princely Courts and Governments. Bayreuth was a typical example of an old “Residenz.” Broad streets flanked by substantial houses, squares with fountains or statues adorning their centres, an old palace or castle—the relic of feudal times—and a more modern palace of French eighteenth-century inspiration; outside the town a “Hermitage,” with a Temple of the Sun, sham ruins and other rococo follies built of cement plastered with mosaics of coloured stone and rock-crystal or glass, in a garden with deliciously shaded, cool walks: these are the legacies of former glories, when the “high-well-born” who crowded to the palace elbowed and jostled for a bow, a smile, or a gracious word from a Markgraf or a Markgräfin with all the honour-hunger of men and women in all times and in all Courts. Think of the bitterness and mortification of a lady left out from a garden-party at the Hermitage when there were to be private theatricals in the Roman Theatre, at which Voltaire was to be stage-manager and act with her Royal Highness in person! Think of the triumph, not untinged with spite, of her next-door neighbour who could flaunt in her face the coveted invitation card! Oh, it was a very real Court! There were chamberlains with their wands; ladies-in-waiting, maids-of-honour, privy councillors, officials of all grades, an army chiefly composed of officers. There were hoop petticoats, powder and rouge and patches, red-heeled shoes, and if there were not many diamonds we may be sure that there was plenty of paste. Just such a Court as Thackeray and Offenbach loved to make fun of, and even Frederick the Great, as we shall presently see, made the target at which to sling his ridicule. Hauff, writing in the first years of the nineteenth century, in his sardonic “Memoiren des Satans,” whom, by the by, he represents as taking a special interest in the pigmy Courts, makes Satan ask the Wandering Jew whether there is anything more grotesque to be seen than “diese duodez Länder,” these duodecimo countries. So it was not foreigners only who laughed at the absurdities which they presented. However, _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_. All now vanished! Gone the transparencies, gone the chamberlains and the Court ladies, gone General Bourn and his staff! All shades—shades that have crossed the Styx. The metamorphosis is complete. The palaces are used as museums or public offices, the houses of the “high-well-born” are shops and places of business, the fountains, in which admiring courtiers saw the rivals of the Grandes Eaux de Versailles, play for an hour on Sundays for the benefit of honest burghers waxing fat upon their afternoon lager, as good Bavarians should, in the groves of the once exclusive Hermitage, turned by the wheel of time into a glorified beer-garden.