Humanly, they were more concerned for the Last Margrave, because of certain qualities which made him the Best Margrave, in spite of the defects of his qualities.  He was the son of the Wild Margrave, equally known in the Ansbach annals, who may not have been the Worst Margrave, but who had certainly a bad trick of putting his subjects to death without trial, and in cases where there was special haste, with his own hand.  He sent his son to the university at Utrecht because he believed that the republican influences in Holland would be wholesome for him, and then he sent him to travel in Italy; but when the boy came home looking frail and sick, the Wild Margrave charged his official travelling companion with neglect, and had the unhappy Hofrath Meyer hanged without process for this crime.  One of the gentlemen of his realm, for a pasquinade on the Margrave, was brought to the scaffold; he had, at various times, twenty-two of his soldiers shot with arrows and bullets or hanged for desertion, besides many whose penalties his clemency commuted to the loss of an ear or a nose; a Hungarian who killed his hunting-dog, he had broken alive on the wheel.  A soldier’s wife was hanged for complicity in a case of desertion; a young soldier who eloped with the girl he loved was brought to Ansbach from a neighboring town, and hanged with her on the same gallows.  A sentry at the door of one of the Margrave’s castles amiably complied with the Margrave’s request to let him take his gun for a moment, on the pretence of wishing to look at it.  For this breach of discipline the prince covered him with abuse and gave him over to his hussars, who bound him to a horse’s tail and dragged him through the streets; he died of his injuries.  The kennel-master who had charge of the Margrave’s dogs was accused of neglecting them:  without further inquiry the Margrave rode to the man’s house and shot him down on his own threshold.  A shepherd who met the Margrave on a shying horse did not get his flock out of the way quickly enough; the Margrave demanded the pistols of a gentleman in his company, but he answered that they were not loaded, and the shepherd’s life was saved.  As they returned home the gentleman fired them off.  “What does that mean?” cried the Margrave, furiously.  “It means, gracious lord, that you will sleep sweeter tonight, for not having heard my pistols an hour sooner.”

From this it appears that the gracious lord had his moments of regret; but perhaps it is not altogether strange that when he died, the whole population “stormed through the streets to meet his funeral train, not in awe-stricken silence to meditate on the fall of human grandeur, but to unite in an eager tumult of rejoicing, as if some cruel brigand who had long held the city in terror were delivered over to them bound and in chains.”  For nearly thirty years this blood-stained miscreant had reigned over his hapless people in a sovereign plenitude of power, which by the theory of German imperialism in our day is still a divine right.