and many other renderings equally erratic. Königsmarck’s style, like his handwriting, was rough-and-ready. Many of his letters were written in haste when on active military service, and one does not expect literary grace from a soldier writing often under difficulties, and always in a foreign language. His sentences are abrupt, and frequently broken by exclamations, interjections, and interrogations, especially when he writes under stress of excitement. But he has a knack of occasionally enforcing his meaning by a happy phrase or homely illustration, and this, combined with frequent allusions to men and things, makes his letters of more general interest than those of the Princess. Egotism is the dominant note. His wit has at times a knack of degenerating into coarseness—a coarseness so great that even in that coarse age we cannot help wondering how a man in his position should be found writing such things to a princess, to a woman he loved and reverenced. But we have to remember that it was an age of licence and freedom of speech; and even the letters of the estimable Electress Sophia to the Duchess of Orleans, whose virtues were unquestioned, and whose intellectual accomplishments were far in advance of her time, were disfigured by a coarseness bordering at times on indecency. If a great princess could so write to another princess we cease to wonder at Königsmarck, who was a man and a soldier and surrounded by the licentiousness of camp and court. Most of his worst lapses are anecdotes relating to his companions in arms; they are not many, and I have taken the liberty of suppressing them, since they are not germane to the narrative. The letters of the Princess are very different in style and diction from those of her lover. They are absolutely free from coarseness (in this respect offering a favourable contrast, for instance, to the letters of the Electress Sophia and the Duchess of Orleans), and give evidence of a refined and gentle nature. They are in admirable French, and if here and there a word is misspelt it is evidently the result of haste. Many of the Princess’s letters are written with grace of style and felicity of diction, to which no translation can do justice. The burden of her theme is ever “I love thee,” or “Thou art not true to me”. The whole of the correspondence, indeed, both her letters and Königsmarck’s, are alternated with passionate avowals of love or equally passionate reproaches. Theirs was not a love that ran smoothly, but was broken from first to last by fears from without and jealousies from within. Yet it is impossible not to see that, after their manner, each loved the other fondly.