places: the official tone of the Prussian court being ostentatiously correct on matters domestic (witness the now historic "Dear Augusta" telegrams); but the elasticity of German views on such points is not likely to be materially affected by a stern masquerade in the interests of morality, and socially the parties concerned suffer no injury whatever.

To persons who have lived long in Germany, the examples of spouses who have dissolved their union, and after years of estrangement have been remarried, cannot be at all unfamiliar. The writer remembers a case of two brothers marrying two sisters (they were from the German provinces of Russia) changing partners, and on death removing one of the husbands and one of the wives, the original pair (now widowed) were for the second time united in the holy bonds of matrimony. It is quite true that the case was exceptional, but it was told with infinite cackling delight and amusement by an admiring circle of indulgent friends.

In the family of the writer a great-uncle seemed to have reached the acme of skilled practice in this matter of the dissolution of matrimony. He sat down every evening of his life to play a rubber of whist with his three divorced wives; they "cut for partners, shuffled, and talked of tricks and honours" with all the gay philosophy of folks for whom words had no meaning, and facts no moral. No one bore⚫animosity to anybody else; the three ladies had all tried their hand at it, but they had held bad cards; the luck was against them, and they each successively threw up the game and awoke to the conviction that their terrible old general (he was a Waterloo man) was much more practicable as a partner at the card-table than as a com

mutual accommodation; there was no illwill and no resentment; the arrangement was conducted in the most business-like and least emotional manner imaginable, and the result proved to be eminently satisfactory to all parties.

We have glanced in a former chapter at the extraordinary license that illustrates German society of an earlier epoch. The histories and biographies of that and subsequent times are filled with unedifying examples; we see a king of Prussia with four "legal" spouses, a preposterous formula of approbation and consent being wrung from each retiring lady in turn. Royal and serene persons present a no more dignified aspect in matters matrimonial than the courtiers, statesmen, and whole cluster of irritable geniuses by whom they are surrounded. The husband faithful to one wife, and the wife faithful to one husband, are the exceptions, not the rule; no scruple was felt by an "incompatible" pair in speaking freely of the desirability of a dissolution of partnership. Why they should have gone through successive marriage ceremonies is the chief mystery; but the honourable thing was to confide your penchant to the wife or husband of your bosom, receive his or her confidence in return, exchange benisons, and go on the flowery way of free-panion for life. It was merely a matter of dom rejoicing. The mark of such morals is stamped plainly on the very front of German society. The matter is generally felt to be one that concerns only the chief actors in it. You do not meddle when a man buys a house, lets a farm, changes his banker, or dissolves partner- The subject of marriage cannot be disship; a sociable acceptance of accom- missed without a brief glance at that suplished facts, an abstention from any un-preme sham called the "morganatic" marnecessarily severe criticism, a stretching riage - a miserable shuffling compromise, out of the elastic mantle of charity, which supposed to have been invented for the covereth a multitude of sins, is supposed preservation of youthful royalties from to be the appropriate tone. Any other matrimonial indiscretions. Nine times out would savour of superfluous and malig- of ten a morganatic marriage means the nant hypocrisy. You are not to judge, left-handed infatuation of a grand duke for lest your turn come to be judged also; be a ballet-dancer, but not always; and the cautious how you throw the invidious English mind is apt to feel intense disgust stone; besides, why disturb the merri- when an English duke's daughter marries ment in hall, and dash the general beard- a small serenity, and is not allowed to go waggings by your stilted niceties of objec- to court in her husband's name. Nor can tion? Toleration is our first duty to our we admire the position, when a remote neighbour, and to afficher such super-prince of the blood, marrying a lady of squeamishness is simply to sin against good-fellowship. The mantle of Cato has fallen in vain on your censorious shoulders, and "private judgment" cannot be allowed to meddle with private matters.

most ancient lineage, brings the "bar sinister" into the coat-of-arms of his children. No matter that the mother was noble; she ought to have been royal; fidelity, purity, and truth avail nothing, her children can

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From Macmillan's Magazine.
MONTENEGRO.

BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN.

. I REMEMBER, twenty or twenty-one years ago, when the madness of the Russian war was at its height, how an English paper gave out, in a boastful tone, that Russia had no ally but "the marauding bishop of Montenegro." This kind of talk aptly represented the kind of feeling which Englishmen had then brought themselves to entertain towards a state which, small as it is, may claim to share with Poland, Hungary, and Venice, the glorious name

of

Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite.

picture of the marauding bishop, the one ally of Russia, was indeed a climax of art in its own way. The only thing to be said against it was that it was all art, and answered to nothing to be found in nature. When the Russian war broke out, Montenegro was no longer governed by a bishop. It might have been questioned whether the marauding part of the picture could be justified at all; it was quite certain that the picture of the "marauding bishop" was purely imaginary. But to patriotic Englishmen of that day such a trifling inaccuracy did not matter. We should have thought it strange if a Russian paper had spoken of England as governed by a protector, or even by a king, marauding or otherwise. But about Montenegro or any other part of Eastern Christendom, it was safe for any man to say anything that he chose, provided only it took the form of abuse. We should have thought it an insult to ourselves and our illustrious confederates, if any one had said that England and France had no allies except the "marauding mufti at Constantinople." In one sense the epithet would have been less applicable. No one can charge the sul

This kind of talk represented also the amount of knowledge which Englishmen then had of the state of south-eastern Europe, an amount of knowledge which most of us sturdily refused to increase. It had become a kind of point of honour not to know anything about the quarter of the world in which we had so strangely taken it into our heads to appear as belligerents. We had gone mad with the most amazing of passions, the love of Turks; and we thought it a matter of duty to see every-tans of the present day with marauding, or thing, past and present, through the spectacles of our beloved. That a Christian state should have presumed to preserve its independence against Mahometan invaders seemed, in the frenzy of the moment, a high crime and misdemeanour. It became a piece of patriotism to hurl some bad name or other at such daring offenders. “Marauding" is an ugly name certainly, though perhaps it might be only human nature for one who is beset by marauders to maraud a little back again in self-defence. Then to talk about a "marauding bishop" seemed a hit of the first order. Of all people in the world, bishops ought not to be marauders; how great must be the iniquity of the people who not only go marauding, but go marauding under the leadership of a bishop. English bishops perhaps felt thankful that they were not as this unbishoplike Montenegrin. They would not go marauding even against a Russian; it was enough to stay at home, and preach and pray against him with the full cursing power of an Irish saint. The

doing anything else, in their own persons. But surely, at least when we are not at war with Russia, the efforts of the Turk to subdue an independent Christian state might be thought to come nearer to marauding than the efforts of the Christian state to maintain its freedom. But, as the Grand Turk is in some sort a sacred person, not a mere sultan or padishah, but the caliph of the prophet on earth, it would surely have been less inaccurate to give him a religious description of some kind than it was to bestow the title of bishop on a potentate so purely secular as the prince of Montenegro was in 1854.

I am tempted to ask whether most of us really know much more about these matters now. I have myself been asked, since the present war began, whether the prince of Montenegro was a Christian, and whether the Montenegrins were on the side of the Turks or on that of the patriots. Certainly no great increase of knowledge or right feeling on such mat ters can come from the last book about