Next summer he is to set out as envoyé to the Court of ----, in order to resume the negotiations respecting the bride of the Prince, which had already been spun at her cradle, and broken off, and to knit them again at the side of her Graham's bed.[61] The Prince must needs, in fact, marry her, because a certain third court, which one is not permitted to name, would fain withhold her thereby from a fourth, which I should be glad to name. But let my word be taken for it, no man in the bridegroom's whole court believes that the reason of his being despatched to the court of the bride is that there fine _esprits_ and fine persons are perhaps articles in demand; verily, in both of these charms he could be outbidden by any one; but in a third charm unfortunately he could not, and one which to an envoyé is dearer and more needful than moral ones--money. At an insolvent court the Prince has the first, and the millionaire the second crown. I have often cursed the confounded hereditary misfortune of the Principality of Scheerau, and perceived that there is seldom enough in its treasury, and we would gladly help ourselves by a national bankruptcy, if we could only first get national credit. But, excepting this Principality, I have never in all my travels found the following four regions anywhere but on Etna itself: first, the _fruitful_, and secondly, the _wooded_ region at the foot of the throne, where fruits and grazing and game-cattle, namely, the populace, are to be found; thirdly, the _icy region_ of the court, which yields nothing but glitter; fourthly, the _torrid_ region of the throne-peak, where there is little to be found except the crater. A throne-crater can swallow up and calcine even gold mountains, and eject them as lava.
Unluckily Gustavus pleased him, because he regarded the young man's youthful good nature as an exclusive attachment to himself, his modesty as lowliness before the Oefelian grandeur, his virtues as weaknesses. He was pleased with him because Gustavus had a taste for poetry, and consequently, he inferred, the greatest for his own; for Oefel's _noble bloody_ contrary to nature, ran in a thin _poetic vein_, and in a _satirical_ one, too, he thought. Perhaps also, Gustavus, in these years of taste, when youth is enraptured with the lesser beauties and faults of poetry, may sometimes have thought even Oefel's good. Now, as even Rousseau says, he can choose no one for a friend who is not pleased with his Heloise; so belletrists can give their hearts only to such people as have a similarity of heart, mind and consequently taste, to themselves, and who accordingly have a sense of the beauties of their poetic effusions as lively as their own.