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the unmeasured enjoyment of these delights had plunged her into debt. Nothing more was to be hoped from August. During her short revel of a reign as favourite Ikbal, August gave her some pearls of great cost. After her fall, necessity compelled her to pawn them. She applied to her ex-lover to redeem them. He promised faintly, but never kept his word. Munificent to the strumpet of the moment, he would not waste his people's money upon a deserted sweetheart. Aurora decided upon trying to become Abbess of Quedlinburg.

Quedlinburg was founded as an abbey in 936 by Kaiser Heinrich II. and his wife Mathilde. It had become in Aurora's day eine geistliche Stiftung für Jungfrauen, a religious institution for virgins (or spinsters) who were of noble birth and had good connections. The revenue of the Stift seems to have been ample, and the abbess was nearly always a lady of royal birth. When Aurora made her attempt upon Quedlinburg, the home of princesses and of countesses, the lady appointed as abbess was Anna Dorothea, Princess of Sachsen-Weimar.

Surely our fair, if worldly, heroine had, in her past career, given proof of a singular fitness for the religious guidance and control of noble virgins; but yet—and this is very painful to record-a strong opposition in the institution itself arose against the appointment of the ex-concubine of August. The protests of the royal and noble ladies were sent to Vienna, and a cabal was formed against Aurora ; but she was a resolute woman of the world, and well understood how to use influence, and how to intrigue against enemies. She could also place proved reliance upon the power of her beauty. Saxony, always in want of ready money, had sold Quedlinburg to Prussia, and August had therefore no power over the elections in the institution. Poor Aurora found but cold comfort in the north, Prussia being but a lukewarm friend to the enchantress; but she was an astute, indomitable woman, who knew well how to gain her ends. She had a half-triumph. Unable to get herself made abbess, she succeeded at length in securing her election as Pröbstin, which may be rendered as sub-prioress. Aurora had desired an appointment, but she had no idea of discharging a duty; and her frequent absences from Quedlinburg brought her into conflict with the very unreasonable authorities. Such a bird in such a cage! She travelled restlessly about wherever interest attracted or pleasure lured, and proved to be a very lazy and indifferent prioress.

When next a vacancy occurred, Aurora used the most strenuous efforts to obtain, or, if necessary, to buy, the post of abbess; but she was again disappointed, and the Princess Maria Elisabeth von Hol

stein-Gottorp was elected.

Aurora never rose higher than Pröbstin,

but she held that post until the day of her death.

Unfeeling Time, that takes in trust our youth, our joys, our all we have, and in the dark and silent grave, when we have wandered all our ways, shuts up the story of our days; that Time which spares no beauty and respects no charm, began to be busy with the very German Antony and Cleopatra of our history. The lady first felt the effects of age; but she retired fighting, and turned to the arts of the toilet in order to oppose the ravages of Time. Her constitution was not so strong as that of August the Strong. Soured by disappointments, and withered by age, with a life of excess telling upon her vitality, Aurora's health began to fail, and the divine creature of former years subsided into a discontented invalid and waning beauty, who possessed no charm and owned no influence that would win inexorable Death to spare her. She died at Quedlinburg, February 15-16, 1728. Death lays his icy hands on kings, and August the Strong, and the Magnificent, died at Warsaw, February 1, 1733. They were not lovely in their lives, and in death they were not long divided. Aurora left very little money, but a large amount of debt, behind her. She was buried in the Stiftskirche at Quedlinburg.

The influence of Louis XIV. upon the morals and the manners of the majority of the German princes of the time was most disastrous. Their palaces were mainly built in imitation of Versailles, and their conduct, as rulers and as men, was an attempt to emulate the reign and the morals of the colossal egoist of France. They naturally failed to see how Louis was paving the way for the French Revolution. Our Charles II., the infamous sovereign who signed the Treaty of Dover, was also a disciple of the Grand Monarque; and August the Strong took Louis for his model. His Jesuits made use, for their own purposes, of the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, but they never checked the open and flagrant sin in which August defiantly wallowed. They treated his depraved debaucheries and excesses with the cold, clammy slime of priestly guile. August should have lived In der heroischen Zeit, da Götter und Göttinnen liebten, Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.

He had, as a gift of nature, violent passions and almost unexampled physique; he had, no doubt, terrible temptation within and from without; he had no reason which he recognised as valid for refraining from the indulgence of his lusts, and he never strangled the impulse of desire with the bowstring of conscience. August was wholly and entirely selfish, in politics and also in love. He had no one high aim in life, no sense of duty, no feeling of right. Indifferent to the rights and to the welfare of his most unhappy people, he revelled in vanity

and he wallowed in sin. A gigantic Mormon, he is almost the foulest figure in a degraded, a depraved, a licentious time. He translated French levity into German heaviness, and he bettered his example. His only shadow of excuse consists in a burning temperament, and in wanton strength of constitution.

And, next, the fair Aurora. In how far was she intrinsically base; in how far was she the creature of those times and circumstances of which she was at once the product and the type? Would she, amid purer and happier surroundings, have been a good woman? It is hard to decide-the case must be left as an hypothesis. And yet her bright eyes seem to look upon us pleadingly, and we remember her many and rare gifts and graces, her varied accomplishments, and her witching charms. It is charm that still pleads in history for the foul, hard, cruel Queen of Scots; for her who could look on calmly while a lover was done to death before her glorious eyes; and Aurora can urge something of the same pretty plea in arrest of sterner, of truer judgment. She left a very tarnished name, and the record of her is that of a wasted life of flaunting vanity and of feverish pleasure. She must have known the real value of the love of her princely lover; and yet, at one time, how she flattered him! Among her many graceful accomplishments was that of making very fair verses. One specimen may serve as a sample of her skill as a poetess. It is a pièce d'occasion. At a great fête August the Strong deigned to personate Alexander the Great ; and his beautiful mistress was inspired to write

Alexandre n'eut point de maître
Et ne souffrit point de rival;
Comme lui le ciel vous fit naître
Pour vaincre et n'avoir point d'égal.
Ta foudre, moins forte et moins prompte
Que votre bras, terrasse et dompte,
Jeune et redoutable vainqueur.
Ajoutons, pour palmes nouvelles,
Jamais contre un héros les belles

Ne sçûrent moins garder le coeur.

Really a delicate and neat piece of flattery in not quite bad verse. She was, naturally, the subject of many lampoons and satires; but she bore all with equanimity, and was distinctly amiable, ever witty, but never bitter. Yes; her beauty, her grace, her wit still plead for the fair, if erring, woman; and our captivated judgment tries to think as favourably as it can of splendid, heartless, voluptuous, sinful, lovely AURORA KÖNIGSMARK.

H. SCHÜTZ WILSON

383

IN PRAISE OF IDLENESS.

a

HE kind of idleness I am about to extol is not a mere makeshift for killing time; it is a serious-a very serious-business;

so serious, in fact, that the man of a flippant or restless nature cannot very well adapt himself to it. To enter into its true spirit one must be like the peers of Gilbert's "Iolanthe "-have absolutely nothing to do, and do it very well. For to "idle" properly one should be as lazy as Ludlam's dog, that leaned his head against a wall to bark. It is all very well for moralists to talk about the virtue of industry-the glorious charm of useful occupation; to preach from the threadbare text, "Laborare est orare," and to emphasise the hortatory maxim that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." As a means of making money, industry has, no doubt, some redeeming points in its favour. Unfortunately, in this ill-arranged world, everybody is not born heir to ten thousand a year, payable quarterly in advance. Some people-the majority, perhaps, but objects of a profound compassion, nevertheless-are compelled to work whether they care about it or not. Instead of "fleeting the time carelessly as one did in the Golden Age," they have to submit to the necessity of the eternal grind. There are certain public instructors who exhort us to cultivate a love of industry as a distinctly precious equipment in life. They have invited us to "consider the ant," and have held up "the busy bee" as an edifying example which we should do well to emulate. I hope I am not lacking. in a proper sense of entomological reverence if I decline to frame my life-conduct upon the model of either the ant or the busy bee. In their way they are doubtless excellent specimens of the more frugal side of the animal kingdom. As types of thrift they would probably be useful object-lessons for an insurance society. But apart altogether from the obviously interested and even selfish character of their industry, it seems to have escaped the observation of their panegyrists that these much-lauded insects enjoy a vacation even longer than that of a queen's counsel. One half of their life is occupied in accumulating stores in order that the other half may be spent in

eating and sleeping. There are not a few of us who would be glad to hybernate on our gains after the fashion of the ant. By some maladroit dispensation on the part of Providence, however, those who would most thoroughly enter into the enjoyment of a lazy life are often those who have to "grunt and sweat under a weary load" of enforced industry.

It is small comfort, when a dreary and unwelcome task has to be finished, to have the maxims of the moralist and their "shocking examples" held up for our edification. We read about the Red Cross Knight drinking of the waters of the Lake of Idleness, and being consequently beaten and made captive by the hideous giant Orgoglio; but the allegory does not make our own labour any the more attractive. Hogarth, again, has drawn a very terrible picture of what befel his "Idle Apprentice," but we don't like work any the better on account of it. We see the sorry rascal treading the downward path to ruin and perdition-wasting his master's time, playing at dice on a tombstone, while the "Industrious Apprentice" is at church; hiding with his paramour from the pursuit of the runners; convicted of crime and terminating his inglorious career on the gibbet. The stern moralist wielded his graver with a powerful purpose, but let me observe that it was not idleness in the proper sense of the term that brought Tom Idle to a bad end and furnished the theme of a great pictorial sermon. It was idleness as distinguished from industry, no doubt, but it was a vicious and inartistic idleness, or rather a vicious and criminal activity, not that indefinable and sensuous abandonment to perfect mental and physical repose which constitutes idleness in its highest and most perfect form. Tom Idle disliked work, and that is a reprehensible frame of mind unless accompanied by the requisite faculty for making laziness the supreme business of life.

There are several conditions of idleness, and I do not pretend to say that they are all equally acceptable. Some men are born idle, some achieve idleness, and some have idleness thrust upon them. The workman on strike is a fair sample of the man who achieves idleness. The results are not always satisfactory, even when a principle is being struggled for or an injustice resented. "Strike pay" usually means limited rations, and who can possibly enjoy idleness with an empty stomach? It may be laid down as an axiom that the gnawings of hunger are inconsistent with the true comfort of laziness. When a man's appetite is sharp set he is more or less unhappy. The dolce far niente implies at least regularity of meals. Not necessarily elaborate meals of several courses, with cunningly

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