Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/78

70 against rule in Flatz, as it is in Dresden, to look at the Court with glasses which diminish and approximate. I myself had on a pair of spectacles, but they were magnifiers. It was impossible for me to resolve on taking them off; and here again, I am afraid, I shall pass for a foolhardy person and a desperado; so much only I reckoned fit, to look invariably into my psalm-book; not once lifting my eyes while the Court was rustling and entering, thereby to denote that my glasses were ground convex. For the rest, the sermon was good, if not always finely conceived for a Court-church; it admonished the hearers against innumerable vices, to whose counterparts, the virtues, another preacher might so readily have exhorted us. During the whole service, I made it my business to exhibit true deep reverence, not only towards God, but also towards my illustrious Prince. For the latter reverence I had my private reason: I wished to stamp this sentiment strongly and openly as with raised letters on my countenance, and so give the lie to any malicious imp about Court, by whom my contravention of the Panegyric on Nero, and my free German satire on this real tyrant himself, which I had inserted in the Flats Weekly Journal, might have been perverted into a secret characteristic portrait of my own Sovereign. We live in such times at present, that scarcely can we compose a pasquinade on the Devil in Hell, but some human Devil on Earth will apply it to an angel.

When the Court at last issued from church, and were getting into their carriages, I kept at such a distance that my face could not possibly be noticed, in case I had happened to assume no reverent look, but an indifferent or even proud one. God knows, who has kneaded into me those mad desperate fancies and crotchets, which perhaps would sit better on a Hero Schabacker than on an Army-chaplain under him. I cannot here forbear recording to you, my Friends, one of the maddest among them, though at first it may throw too glaring a light on me. It was at my ordination to be Army-chaplain,