His Duchess, Louisa Dorothee, is a Princess of distinguished qualities, literary tastes,--Voltaire's Hostess, Friedrich's Correspondent: a bright and quietly shining illumination to the circle she inhabits.

Duke is now fifty-eight, Duchess forty-seven; and they lost their eldest Son last year.

There has been lately a considerable private brabble as to Tutorage of the Duke of Weimar (Wilhelmina's maddish Duke, who is dead lately; and a Prince left, who soon died also, but left a Son, who grew to be Goethe's friend); Tutorage claimed by various Cousins, has been adjudged to this one, King Friedrich co-operating in such result.
"As to the famed Grand-Duchess, she is a Sachsen-Meiningen Princess, come of Ernst the Pious, of Johann the Magnanimous, as her Husband and all these Sachsens are: when Voltaire went precipitant, with such velocity, from the Potsdam Heaven, she received him at Gotha; set him on writing his HISTORY OF THE EMPIRE, and endeavored to break his fall.

She was noble to Voltaire, and well honored by that uncertain Spirit.

There is a fine Library at Gotha; and the Lady bright loves Books, and those that can write them;--a friend of the Light, a Daughter of the Sun and the Empyrean, not of Darkness and the Stygian Fens." [Michaelis, i.