No money to be got from Mecklenburg; and Mecklenburg owes us "ten tons of gold,"-- that is to say, 1,000,000 thalers, "tou" being the tenth part of a million in that coin.

Hanover, therefore, holds possession--and has held ever since, with competent small military force--of certain Districts in Mecklenburg: Taxes of these will subsist our soldiery in the interim, and yield interest; the principal once paid, we at once give them up; principal, by these schedules, if you care to count them, is one million thalers (ten TONNEN GOLDES, as above said), or about 150,000 pounds.

And so it has stood for ten years past; Mecklenburg the most anarchic of countries, owing to the kind of Ritters and kind of Duke it has.

Poor souls, it is evident they have all lost their beaten road, and got among the IGNES FATUI and peat-pools: none knows the necessities and sorrows of this poor idle Duke himself! In his young years, before accession, he once tried soldiering; served one campaign with Charles XII., but was glad to "return to Hamburg" again, to the peaceable scenes of fashionable life there.

[See _German Spy_ (London, 1725, by Lediard, Biographer of Marlborough) for a lively picture of the then Hamburg,--resort of Northern Moneyed Idleness, as well as of better things.] Then his Russian Unique of Wives:--his probable adventures, prior and subsequent, in Uncle Peter's sphere, can these have been pleasant to him?
The angry Ritters, too, their country had got much trampled to pieces in the Charles-Twelfth Wars, Stralsund Sieges: money seemed necessary to the Duke, and the Ritters were very scarce of it.
Add, on both sides, pride and want of sense, with mutual anger going on CRESCENDO; and we have the sad phenomenon now visible: A Duke fled to Dantzig, anarchic Ritters none the better for his going; Duke perhaps threatening to return, and much flurrying his poor interim Brother, and stirring up the Anarchies:--in brief, Mecklenburg become a house on fire, for behoof of neighbors and self.
In these miserable brabbles Friedrich Wilhelm did not hitherto officially interfere; though not uninterested in them; being a next neighbor, and even, by known treaties, "eventual heir," should the Mecklenburg Line die out.