supremacy, but, in spite of all ordinances, the disputes about rank, offices, and titles were endless--worse than the men, were the ladies. In 1750, at one of the royal courts, all the ladies of the nobility left their places in church because the daughter of one of the newly ennobled officials--a "_wirklichen Geheimerath_"--sought for a place in their choir. This wide sphere of trifling interests gave great importance to the nobility, calculating from the Imperial Court at Vienna down to the household of the baron of the Empire, who always maintained one or more poor _Junkers_ in his circle; together with the collateral and lateral branches of the greater families, it might be estimated that there were somewhere about 5 or 600 court households in Germany, besides 1500 households of "Knights of the Empire;" so that, undoubtedly, there were more than 5000 court offices and employments. The enormous number of these court places was not advantageous to the manly character of the noble. To be able to endure with smiles the humours and roughness of an unbridled sovereign, to be complaisant as the pliant servant of the despot's licentious desires, and of the mistresses' establishment, was not the worst effect. He was in imminent danger of becoming so base that the coarseness of the poor _Krippenreiter_ appeared comparatively virtuous. It was a period when the noble mother gave her daughter with pleasure into the arms of the profligate prince; and when the courtier gave up his wife to him for money. And it was not only done by poor nobles, but also by the offshoots of royal houses. The nobles in some German provinces took the opportunity of practising similar complaisance, even in our century, towards Napoleon's princes and marshals. But the worst was that the great mass of the court nobility drew also the families of landed proprietors, who were related to them, to their residences. Sensible men were never weary of complaining that the country nobles no longer dwelt on their properties to the great damage of their coffers and morals; but thronged to the neighbourhood of the princes to ruin themselves, their wives and daughters in the pestilential atmosphere of the court. But these were fruitless warnings in the greater part of Germany till the middle of the eighteenth century.