'Au reste,' one must acknowledge that however brilliant such agreeable chatter may be at the moment, it goes out like a fusee, and leaves nothing on the memory; so that the pedantic German feels a sort of uneasiness after listening to it, and regrets having spent his time so unprofitably. Had it been possible to that element of Germanism which formed our language, to give it that lightness, roundness, agreeable equivocalness, and at the same time precision and definiteness,--qualities which are called into full play in society by French audacity,--the conversation of the German would certainly have been the more satisfactory of the two, for he would never have neglected to connect the useful with the agreeable. As it is, we Germans have nothing left in society, but that sort of talent which the French call 'l'esprit des escaliers;'--that, namely, which suggests to a man as he is going down stairs, the clever things he might have said in the 'salon.' Of this Frenchman's fireworks and crackers I retain nothing but the following anecdote. A diplomatic writer, who passed as authority in the time of Louis the Fourteenth, concluded a treatise on the great privileges pertaining to foreign envoys, with the following words;--'mais dès qu'un ambassadeur est mort, il rentre dans la vie privée.' _January 22nd._ The poor Duke of York is at length dead, after a long illness, and lay in state yesterday with great magnificence. I saw him in October, and found him, even then, the shadow of the robust stately man whom I had formerly so often seen at Lady L----'s, and at his own house, where six bottles of claret after dinner scarcely made a perceptible change in his countenance. I remember that in one such evening,--it was indeed already after midnight,--he took some of his guests, among whom were the Austrian Ambassador, Count Meerveldt, Count Beroldingen, and myself, into his beautiful armoury. We tried to swing several Turkish sabres, but none of us had a very firm grasp; whence it happened that the Duke and Count Meerveldt both scratched themselves with a sort of straight Indian sword, so as to draw blood. Count Meerveldt then wished to try if it cut as well as a real Damascus, and undertook to cut through one of the wax candles which stood on the table. The experiment answered so ill, that both the candles, candlesticks and all, fell to the ground and were extinguished. While we were groping about in the dark, and trying to find the door, the Duke's aide-de-camp, Colonel C----, stammered out in great agitation, "By God, Sir, I remember the sword is poisoned!" You may conceive the agreeable feelings of the wounded at this intelligence. Happily on further examination it appeared that claret and not poison was at the bottom of the Colonel's exclamation.