On our arrival in Denmark, we found the king and queen of that country

elevated in two arm-chairs on a kitchen-table, holding a Court. The

whole of the Danish nobility were in attendance; consisting of a noble

boy in the wash-leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a venerable Peer

with a dirty face who seemed to have risen from the people late in life,

and the Danish chivalry with a comb in its hair and a pair of white

silk legs, and presenting on the whole a feminine appearance. My gifted

townsman stood gloomily apart, with folded arms, and I could have wished

that his curls and forehead had been more probable.

Several curious little circumstances transpired as the action proceeded.

The late king of the country not only appeared to have been troubled

with a cough at the time of his decease, but to have taken it with him

to the tomb, and to have brought it back. The royal phantom also carried

a ghostly manuscript round its truncheon, to which it had the appearance

of occasionally referring, and that too, with an air of anxiety and a

tendency to lose the place of reference which were suggestive of a state

of mortality. It was this, I conceive, which led to the Shade's being

advised by the gallery to "turn over!"--a recommendation which it took

extremely ill. It was likewise to be noted of this majestic spirit, that

whereas it always appeared with an air of having been out a long time

and walked an immense distance, it perceptibly came from a closely

contiguous wall. This occasioned its terrors to be received derisively.

The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no doubt historically

brazen, was considered by the public to have too much brass about her;

her chin being attached to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as

if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled by another,

and each of her arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned

as "the kettle-drum."

The noble boy in the ancestral boots was

inconsistent, representing himself, as it were in one breath, as an able

seaman, a strolling actor, a grave-digger, a clergyman, and a person

of the utmost importance at a Court fencing-match, on the authority

of whose practised eye and nice discrimination the finest strokes were

judged. This gradually led to a want of toleration for him, and even--on

his being detected in holy orders, and declining to perform the funeral

service--to the general indignation taking the form of nuts. Lastly,

Ophelia was a prey to such slow musical madness, that when, in course of

time, she had taken off her white muslin scarf, folded it up, and buried

it, a sulky man who had been long cooling his impatient nose against an

iron bar in the front row of the gallery, growled, "Now the baby's put

to bed let's have supper!" Which, to say the least of it, was out of

keeping.




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