That is all, all, and life is where it was a month ago; only, "I wear my rue with a difference." He was my inferior. I was higher and nobler and purer than he, but I loved him, and the greatest joy I could know would have been to lead my life with him. So it is over, and this book had best be put away. I will go back to my old life, and see what I can make of it. I am glad to have known what love meant: I shall be gladder after a while, when this ache is over. If he could but have loved me as I loved him—if he could! But he could not, and it was not to be. I must learn to be again a strong-minded woman.
Letter from Henry Lawrence to George Manning.
DEAR GEORGE: I'm off for Europe to-morrow. I behaved like a man and broke the whole thing off. She behaved like a man too, told me how much she loved me, and then accepted the position. I feel like a girl who has jilted a fellow, and it's a very poor way to feel. Never flirt with a strong-minded woman. I believe she cared for me, and I think very likely when I'm fifty I shall think I was a fool not to have braved it out and married her. I'm sure if I don't think it then, I shall when I reach the next world; but then, like the girl in Browning's poem, "she will pass, nor turn her face."
I feel very blue, and I think I'd better ask Alice to marry me. Yours, H.L.
MARSHALL NEIL.
THE KING OF BAVARIA.
Of all the prominent personages who, through their official position or individual power, or both combined, occupy at present the eye of the public, probably not one is more unjustly criticised or more generally misunderstood than Ludwig II., king of Bavaria. As a reigning monarch, young, handsome, secluded in his habits and unmarried, he is of course exposed to all the inquisitive observation and exaggerated gossip which the feminine curiosity and masculine envy of a court and capital can supply—gossip which is eagerly listened to by the annual crowd of foreigners who spend a few days in Munich to visit the Pinakothek, listen to a Wagner opera, and catch, if possible, a glimpse of the romantic young king; and is by them carried home to find public circulation at third hand through the columns of sensation newspapers. And when to this personal criticism is added the strife of opinion over his political acts, and the ill-will of the extreme Church party in consequence of his liberal tendencies, it may easily be believed that his real character is but little known, and is in many cases deliberately falsified. A brief review of the facts and circumstances of his reign may serve to correct, in some degree, the false impressions which have so long prevailed.
In 1864, in the midst of the confusion of the Schleswig-Holstein war, which was then agitating all Germany, King Max died, and his eldest son, Ludwig, only nineteen years old, was summoned from the quiet routine of his university studies to ascend the throne of Bavaria. In childhood his health had been extremely delicate, and on that account he had been educated in unusual privacy—training which, joined to his naturally reserved and meditative disposition, and the various disenchantments of his public career, may satisfactorily account for his present confirmed love of solitude. The position to which he was so unexpectedly called was an exceedingly difficult one for a mind filled, as his was, with ideal visions of liberty and progress, and totally inexperienced in the ways of a selfish world and in the profundity of Jesuitical intrigues; and the unavoidable embarrassments of the time had been increased by the course of his immediate predecessors. Ludwig I., through a sentimental love of the picturesque, had encouraged the multiplication of monasteries and convents and brotherhoods of wandering friars, and Maximilian, though naturally tolerant, and still more liberalized by the influence of his Protestant queen, was a firm believer in the divine right of kings; and having joined hands with the clerical party in putting down the revolution of 1848, found himself afterward so far compromised in their behalf that he was unable to oppose their aggrandizing plans; so that in his reign the priests, and especially the Jesuits, attained to a greater degree of power than they had ever before known.
The young king for a while carried on the government after his father's policy, and with the same ministerial officers; but he soon began to show signs of independence of character, the first manifestation of which was an attempt to curtail the power of the Jesuits, especially in the matter of public instruction. This was, of course, enough to rouse the enmity of the whole Society of Jesus against him, and its members have been busy ever since in thwarting all his plans and doing their utmost to render him unpopular with his subjects.