King Louis of Bavaria, famed for his poems and his
taste in art, has in his old age carried his taste into the practical province of gallantries. The Andalusian dancer Lola Montes, after wan- dering over Europe from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, found an asylum at Munich, and prospectively a palace and a noble title. There has been a great scandal ; but much of the blame lies with those pedantic or intriguing Ministers who made it public. Un- less they are engaged in a mission to reform the manners of royalty throughout Europe they had no business to step beyond their political province. in the earliest of records we read of monarchs thawing the frost of age in the genial arms of youth ; down to the latest we observe the expedient to be not unusual with the royal classes. And in the land of Broom-girls it is easy to understand that the Andalusian is the Queen of Beauty. In that land, however, there is such an excess of decorum, that the affair has deranged and stayed the whole machinery of state. King Louis wished to naturalize his Dutchess of Portsmouth, whereupon all his Ministers resigned in a body. Not only so, but they addressed a formal lecture to the King—a lay sermon, as questionable in its taste as in its motives and in its assertions : they informed him that the whole country was outraged, that the people were contracting a dangerous habit of reading the newspapers, and that the Bishop of Augs- burg was daily shedding tears, with other portentous signs. To impress the lachrymose fact more strongly on the Royal mind, it is mentioned that the Minister of the Interior and one of his colleagues had witnessed the episcopal effusions ; though it is not specified at what hour the diurnal phrenomenon takes place. It is said, indeed, that Lola Montes is merely a scapegoat—the corpus vile on which the statesmen of Bavaria are making a great constitutional experiment ; they having long ob- jected to a considerable stretch of the royal prerogative in the way of naturalization. Also they are at issue with the Court on ecclesiastical matters. Now in the present case they catch the King at a disadvantage—have him, as it were, on the hip. At the date of the last accounts the war still raged—Ministers pout- ing, King doating, lady flaunting, people rioting.
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