The little episode of his first love, combined with his ungovernable fury and despair at its tragic conclusion, had of course the natural result common in such a case, to the fate of all who are destined to occupy thrones. A marriage was ‘arranged’ for him; and pressing reasons of state were urged for the quick enforcement and carrying out of the ‘arrangement.’ The daughter of a neighbouring potentate was elected to the honour of his alliance,--a beautiful girl with a pale, cold clear-cut face and brilliant eyes, whose smile penetrated the soul with an icy chill, and whose very movement, noiseless and graceful as it was, reminded one irresistibly of slowly drifting snow. She was attended to the altar, as he was, by all the ministers and plenipotentiaries of state that could possibly be gathered together from the four quarters of the globe as witnesses to the immolation of two young human lives on the grim sacrificial stone of a Dynasty; and both prince and princess accepted their fate with mutually silent and civil resignation. Their portraits, set facing each other with a silly smile, or taken in a linked arm-in-arm attitude against a palatial canvas background, appeared in every paper published throughout the world, and every scribbler on the Press took special pains to inform the easily deluded public that the Royal union thus consummated was ‘a romantic love-match.’ For the People still have heart and conscience,--the People, taken in the rough lump of humanity, still believe in love, in faith, in the dear sweetness of home affections. The politicians who make capital out of popular emotion, know this well enough,--and are careful to play the tune of their own personal interest upon the gamut of National Sentiment in every stump oration. For how terrible it would be if the People of any land learned to judge their preachers and teachers by the lines of fact alone! Inasmuch as fact would convincingly prove to them that their leaders prospered and grew rich, while they stayed poor; and they might take to puzzling out reasons for this inadequacy which would inevitably cause trouble. For this, and divers other motives politic, the rosy veil of sentiment is always delicately flung more or less over every new move on the national debating-ground,--and whether marriageable princes and princesses love or loathe each other, still, when they come to wed, the words ‘romantic love-match’ must be thrown in by an obliging Press in order to satisfy the tender scruples of a people who would certainly not abide the thought of a Royal marriage contracted in mutual aversion. Thus much soundness and right principle there is at least, in what some superfine persons call the ‘common’ folk,--the folk whose innermost sense of truth and straightforwardness, not even the proudest statesman dare outrage.