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HEES BEEG BUFFALO LANCE SHE GO CLEAN TROO MY SHOULDAR."

THE ROMANCE OF A MAD KING.

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BY REV. ALEXANDER MACKAY-SMITH, D.D.

Na wet and dreary evening in the month of June, 1886, the last act in one of the most striking tragedies of modern times was closed near the romantic Castle of Berg, on the Lake of Starnberg, in Bavaria. Two powerful figures are seen locked in a deadly embrace, swaying back and forth in the shallow waters near the shore, the one struggling for life, the other for liberty; until, both losing their foothold, the waves engulf them in a common grave, and the body of a monarch, once known as the most enviable of mankind," floats quietly at last beside that of his faithful physician.

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The story of the life of King Louis II. of Bavaria is sufficiently familiar to most of our readers to render any minute repetition of it needless. If it had been asked on the day when he mounted the throne in the year 1864 who had the best chance of happiness of all then alive, his name would probably have commanded the suffrages of most men. He possessed talents, beauty, wealth, and rank to a degree fully entitling him to claim the ring of Polycrates. And he reigned over a nation which, although not in the first rank in power, was yet devotedly attached to its handsome boy King, and desired nothing so much as that he should have his own way. He had it; and the tragedy of the Starnberg Lake, after more than twenty years of thorough selfishness, unbounded pride, and wasteful extravagance, forms a melancholy commentary on the truth that no human power can make good a lack of the commonplace elements of self-restraint and a sense of duty.

Some allowance must, however, be made for the fact that the young King inherit ed the poor blood of the Wittelsbach family, which, compounded in equal parts of pride and incapacity, had been further corrupted by Napoleon, who, in the early part of this century, half-contemptuously dropped a crown on the "electoral" head of its ruler, in payment for services received.

An almost insane insistence on their majesty and dignity may after this be ob

served as the key-note to the ruling ideas of these "monarchs." They had an uneasy sense, apparently, that they did not belong to the first rank of kings. In their palaces the visitor will find the crown stamped or embroidered a dozen times where it may appear once in the "Schloss" at Vienna, or the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg. This inherited disease of royal vanity lay cankering and corrupting beneath all the other maladies which wrecked the life of Louis II.

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The Bavarians are a patient people, industrious, contented, and with an ample share of the virtues common to the Gerrace. They possess, however, like other nations, "the vices of their virtues," to use a French expression. They have no particular love of liberty, and rather prefer a strong King who will show them the way to walk in. Their idea of government and rulers is so utterly different from that of the Englishman or American that we are hardly competent to criticise them, or to understand the apparent placidity with which in the reign of Louis they watched the growth of his extravagance, arrogance, and contempt for his own subjects.

At last, however, the inevitable result was reached. The King, after drawing for many years uncounted millions from his subjects in return for duties unperformed, endeavored to bankrupt the state by unlimited borrowing, while he withdrew from all intercourse with his despised fellow - beings, except that of grooms and stable-boys. The people being virtually without a ruler, and conscious that they were fast incurring the ridicule of Europe, awoke to the need of decisive measures. The story of the King's arrest at the Castle of Hohenschwangau reads like a chapter by the author of the Prisoner of Zenda, so romantic and mediæval are its details. It came nigh to being a failure, but at last blundered into success. Amid the breathless and awe-struck wonder of the simple peasantry and kindly burghers, the monarch who for years had hardly deigned to visit Munich, and who, when there, had

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driven through the streets surrounded by guards in order that, like a sultan, he might neither see nor be seen by the crowd, was at last entrapped by his ministers and relatives, and conveyed to Berg, the home of his childhood. A few days later the lake received and stilled for ever that proud, misguided, and selfish heart. For once the Bavarians, to whom the arts owe so much, had made freedom also their debtor.

It is well known, as stated above, that the form assumed by the insanity of

King Louis was a kind of megalomania, an absurd idea as to his own relative importance in the scheme of things, due in part to defective home training, in part doubtless to having ascended his little throne when a mere boy. Had this led him to place himself at the head of his army in the war of 1866 with Prussia, or in the Franco-German war of 1870, winning laurels for Bavaria, it might well have been pardoned as a useful delusion. But in both these wars he rendered himself conspicuous among the German

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princes by shunning the field of battle and devoting himself to the arts. And it must be confessed that in these he might, with proper application, have attained some personal distinction. The musical world owes him a debt of gratitude for his patronage of Wagner. He took a deep interest in painting and sculpture, and opened a lavish purse to encourage many other arts. But his chief claim to the remembrance of posterity will always be the palaces, or castles, which he built. Many of the most famous artists of Europe were occupied for years in designing and furnishing them, and the demand which they stimulated for the highest kind of excellence, not merely in painting, but in the kindred pursuits of glass-staining, gold-embroidery, tile moulding, and brass and bronze designing of a high grade, contributed in no small degree to give Munich its present importance as the home of these arts. In visiting these ed

ifices to-day one cannot but be impressed by the magnificence of the King's ideas. We may object to his taste as too much inclined to the worship of the "rococo," and as showing too great a dependence on the value of gold in ornament, but we cannot deny him the credit of a fine discrimination in the gathering of art treasures to furnish these palaces from all the ends of the earth.

The tourist in Bavaria who fails to see these creations of King Louis loses one of the most interesting trips in central Europe. Let us take them in the usual order of Linderhof, Neuschwanstein, and Herrenchiemsee. Linderhof is a royal lodge, deep in the heart of the Bavarian Highlands, to the south of Munich. It was built at the period when the King first began to shun the faces of his subjects. Its artistic merit is disfigured by too close an imitation of the art methods and ideals of the age of Louis Quinze. Indeed, both here and at Herrenchiemsee

the great defect which haunts the observer is a realization of how heartily the Bavarian King admired not merely the age, but the persons of Louis XIV. and XV. of France. It seems a part of his madness that he should hit upon two of the very worst Kings who ever reigned to exalt and to imitate, and slavishly fill his pal aces with their busts and representations of their wars and conquests. Linderhof irresistibly suggests Trianon. But it is an improved and glorified Trianon. The apartments are furnished with a magnificence which beggars description. The guide rolls off glib figures about ivory lustres which cost $7000 apiece, and fireplaces worth $50,000, until his hearers cannot help thinking of Carlyle's housemaid visiting the art gallery and uttering her tribute of admiration in the words, "How very expensive!" Aside from this jarring accompaniment, however, the little house is a dream of luxury and splendor. Every inch of wall and ceiling glows with a beauty of color and a harmony of arrangement which stagger the observer. It is, indeed, too splendid for a small residence in the wilderness. Beneath its roof Louis spent long months entirely alone. There is but one bedchamber in the house. He sat in a room that is one mass of gold, reading at a priceless table underneath a royal canopy of marvellous lace and tap

ures; the horses' heads were decked with ostrich plumes. The belated peasant gazed with amazement at the gorgeous vision, and shrank back into the forest lest his presence should awaken the displeasure of the King.

There is a "blue grotto " in the grounds of Linderhof which is one of the wonders of the world. It is entirely artificial, and is said to have cost several million dollars, but the work is so admirably executed that it closely reflects nature. The principal grotto contains a blue lake, with a waterfall which comes roaring down out of the darkness in a rain of color. A forest of stalactites rises all around; on the lake is seen a splendid barge drawn by swans; the moon and a rain

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THE BLUE GROTTO, LINDERHOF. After a photograph, copyrighted by G. Stuffler, Munich.

estry, or wandered through gardens whose fountains surpass those of Versailles. In the winter nights he would drive through the lonely forests, over private roads which no one else could use, in a sledge all blue and gold, drawn by six white steeds, and brilliantly illuminated. The corners of the sledge were adorned with carved fig *Said to have cost nearly $200,000.

bow are visible. In this boat the King, dressed in the costume of Lohengrin, would sit and sail. The entrance to the grotto is invisible, being shut in by revolving stones. The whole forms a scene of such fairy subterranean splendor as probably exists nowhere else in the world. Outside, as one emerges bewildered into day, the fountains go foaming down the

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