242.]--Age thirty-six and some months.

Only Daughter of Electress Sophie; and Father's Mother of Frederick the Great.
She was, in her time, a highly distinguished woman; and has left, one may say, something of her likeness still traceable in the Prussian Nation, and its form of culture, to this day.

Charlottenburg (Charlotte's-town, so called by the sorrowing Widower), where she lived, shone with a much-admired French light under her presidency,--French essentially, Versaillese, Sceptico-Calvinistic, reflex and direct,--illuminating the dark North; and indeed has never been so bright since.

The light was not what we can call inspired; lunar rather, not of the genial or solar kind: but, in good truth, it was the best then going; and Sophie Charlotte, who was her Mother's daughter in this as in other respects, had made it her own.

They were deep in literature, these two Royal Ladies; especially deep in French theological polemics, with a strong leaning to the rationalist side.
They had stopped in Rotterdam once, on a certain journey homewards from Flanders and the Baths of Aix-la-Chapelle, to see that admirable sage, the doubter Bayle.