’Rex erat AEneas nobis, quo justior alter
    Nec pietate fuit, nec bello major et armis.’”

Such are a few of the puerile anecdotes of a prince who died in early youth, gleaned from a contemporary manuscript, by an eye and ear witness.  They are trifles, but trifles consecrated by his name.  They are genuine; and the philosopher knows how to value the indications of a great and heroic character.  There are among them some which may occasion an inattentive reader to forget that they are all the speeches and the actions of a child!

THE DIARY OF A MASTER OF THE CEREMONIES.

Of court-etiquette few are acquainted with the mysteries, and still fewer have lost themselves in its labyrinth of forms.  Whence its origin?  Perhaps from those grave and courtly Italians, who, in their petty pompous courts, made the whole business of their effeminate days consist in punctilios; and, wanting realities to keep themselves alive, affected the mere shadows of life and action, in a world of these mockeries of state.  It suited well the genius of a people who boasted of elementary works to teach how affronts were to be given, and how to be taken; and who had some reason to pride themselves in producing the Cortegiano of Castiglione, and the Galateo of Della Casa.  They carried this refining temper into the most trivial circumstances, when a court was to be the theatre, and monarchs and their representatives the actors.  Precedence, and other honorary discriminations, establish the useful distinctions of ranks, and of individuals; but their minuter court forms, subtilised by Italian conceits, with an erudition of precedents, and a logic of nice distinctions, imparted a mock dignity of science to the solemn fopperies of a master of the ceremonies, who exhausted all the faculties of his soul on the equiponderance of the first place of inferior degree with the last of a superior; who turned into a political contest the placing of a chair and a stool; made a reception at the stairs’-head, or at the door, raise a clash between two rival nations; a visit out of time require a negotiation of three months; or an awkward invitation produce a sudden fit of sickness; while many a rising antagonist, in the formidable shapes of ambassadors, were ready to despatch a courier to their courts, for the omission or neglect of a single punctilio.  The pride of nations, in pacific times, has only these means to maintain their jealousy of power:  yet should not the people be grateful to the sovereign who confines his campaigns to his drawing-room:  whose field-marshal is a tripping master of the ceremonies; whose stratagems are only to save the inviolability of court-etiquette; and whose battles of peace are only for precedence?