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398
FIRE OF FREDERIKSBORG.
Chap. LVII.
worst. We stood at the entrance of the building where
they were stowed away, and saw them brought out one
by one, battered, singed, but few uninjured. At the first
glance my mind misgave me ; and when a Gyldenløve—
gallant young son of Christian IV., slain at the siege
of Copenhagen—first came forth, I felt at once the
whole of the earlier portraits of the house of Oldenborg
were doomed. Of that splendid series of two hundred
years and upwards, from Christian I. downwards, not
one remained—portraits by Lucas Cranach, by John of
Cleves, Carl van Mander, Wuchter, Jacob van Dort:
of our house of Stuart not one. The Northmen had
been more fortunate; but the sole existing portrait of
Tycho Brahe had perished. Of modern atrocities, copies,
bad and worthless; of living celebrities, and those
scarcely dead, there were enough, and more. , James II.
and his brother, in their orange surcoats, came out one
by one; but few portraits of any merit. My Carlyle room
fared better. George II. and his glorious queen, the fair
Princess of Hesse, and other old acquaintances, sadly
bemired; and when Wilhelmina of Baireuth—the witty
she of the memoirs—appeared, she looked so sprightly,
so true to life, in her want of feeling, as though she
thought it such fun being saved from the fire, I could
have boxed her ears with as great a gusto as her
plethoric old father ever did in his lifetime.
Of poor Caroline Matilda one portrait alone
escaped, and that the ugly one. Strange fate hers, to be
always burnt as a beauty and preserved as a fright!
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