When Hastings had passed many years in He lived about four years longer in the en. retirement, and had long outlived the common joyment of good spirits, of faculties not image of men, he again became for a short time paired to any painful or degrading extent, and an object of general attention. In 1813 the of health such as is rarely enjoyed by those charter of the East India Company was renew-who attain such an age. At length, on the 22d ed; and much discussion about Indian affairs of August, 1819, in the eighty-sixth year of his took place in Parliament. It was determined to age, he met death with the same tranquil and examine witnesses at the bar of the Commons, decorous fortitude which he had opposed to and Hastings was ordered to attend. He had all the trials of his various and eventful life. appeared at that bar before. It was when he With all his fa ilts-and they were neither read his answer to the charges which Burke few nor small-only one cemetery was worthy had laid on the table. Since that time twenty- to contain his remains. In that temple of siseven years had elapsed; public feeling had lence and reconciliation, where the enmities undergone a complete change; the nation had of twenty generations lie buried, in the Great now forgotten his faults, and remembered only Abbey which has for ages afforded a quiet his services. The reappearance, too of a man resting-place to those whose minds and bodies who had been among the most distinguished have been shattered by the contentions of the of a generation that had passed away, who now Great Hall, the dust of the illustrious accused belonged to history, and who seemed to have should have been mingled with the dust of the risen from the dead, could not but produce a illustrious accusers. This was not to be. Yet solemn and pathetic effect. The Commons the place of interment was not ill chosen. Bereceived him with acclamations, ordered a hind the chancel of the parish-church of chair to be set for him, and when he retired, Daylesford, in earth which already held the rose and uncovered. There were, indeed, a bones of many chiefs of the house of Hastings, few who did not sympathize with the general was laid the coffin of the greatest man who feeling. One or two of the managers of the has ever borne that ancient and widely extendimpeachment were present. They sat in the ed name. On that very spot probably, foursame seats which they had occupied when they score years before, the little Warren, meanly had been thanked for the services which they clad and scantily fed, had played with the chilhad rendered in Westminster Hall; for, by the dren of ploughmen. Even then his young mind courtesy of the House, a member who has been had revolved plans which might be called rothanked in his place, is considered as having a mantic. Yet, however romantic, it is not likeright always to occupy that place. These gen- ly that they had been so strange as the truth. tlemen were not disposed to admit that they Not only had the poor orphan retrieved the nad employed several of the best years of their fallen fortunes of his line. Not only had he lives in persecuting an innocent man. They repurchased the old lands, and rebuilt the old accordingly kept their seats, and pulled their dwelling. He had preserved and extended an hats over their brows; but the exceptions only empire. He had founded a polity. He had made the prevailing enthusiasm more remark-administered government and war with more able. The Lords received the old man with than the capacity of Richelieu; and had pasimilar tokens of respect. The University of tronised learning with the judicious liberality Oxford conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Cosmo. He had been attacked by the most of Laws; and, in the Sheldonian theatre, the formidable combination of enemies that ever under-graduates welcomed him with tumultu- sought the destruction of a single victim; and ous cheering. over that combination, after a struggle of ten years, he had triumphed. He had at length gone down to his grave in the fulness of agein peace, after so many troubles; in honour, after so much obloquy.

These marks of public esteem were soon followed by marks of the favour of the crown. Hastings was sworn of the Privy Council, and was admitted to a long private audience of the Prince Regent, who treated him very graciously. When the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia visited England, Hastings appeared in their train both at Oxford and in the Guildhall of London; and, though surrounded by a crowd of princes and great warriors, was everywhere received by the public with marks of respect and admiration. He was presented by the Prince Regent both to Alexander and to Frederic William; and his Royal Highness went so far as to declare in public, that honours far higher than a seat in the Privy Council were due, and should soon be paid, to the man who had saved the British dominions in Asia. Hastings now confidently expected a peerage; but. from some unexplained cause, he was agan disappointed.

Those who look on his character without fa vour or malevolence, will pronounce that, in the two great elements of all social virtue-in respect for the rights of others, and in sympa thy for the sufferings of others-he was deficient. His principles were somewhat lax. His heart was somewhat hard. But while we cannot with truth describe him either as a righteous or as a merciful ruler, we cannot regard without admiration the amplitude and fertility of his intellect-his rare talents for command, for administration, and for controversy-his dauntless courage-his honourable poverty-his fervent zeal for the interests of the state-his noble equanimity, tried by both extremes of fortune, and never disturbed by either.

FREDERIC THE GREAT.*

EDINBURGH REVIEW, APRIL, 1842.]

THIS work, which has the high honour of being introduced to the world by the author of "Lochiel" and "Hohenlinden," is not wholly unworthy of so distinguished a chaperon. It professes, indeed, to be no more than a compilation; but it is an exceedingly amusing compilation, and we shall be glad to have more of it. The narrative comes down at present only to the commencement of the Seven Years' War, and therefore does not comprise the most interesting portion of Frederic's reign.

tentatious and profuse, negligent of his true interests and of his high duties, insatiably eager for frivolous distinctions, he added nothing to the real weight of the state which he governed; perhaps he transmitted his inheritance to his children impaired rather than augmented in value, but he succeeded in gaining the great object of his life, the title of king. In the year 1700 he assumed this new dignity. He had on that occasion to undergo all the mortifications which fall to the lot of ambitious It may not be unacceptable to our readers upstarts. Compared with the other crowned that we should take this opportunity of pre-heads of Europe, he made a figure resembling senting them with a slight sketch of the life of the greatest king that has, in modern times, succeeded by right of birth to a throne. It may, we fear, be impossible to compress so long and eventful a story within the limits which we must prescribe to ourselves. Should we be compelled to break off, we shall, when the continuation of this work appears, return to the subject.

that which a Nabob or a Commissary, who had bought a title, would make in the company of Peers whose ancestors had been attainted for treason against the Plantagenets.

The envy of the class which he quitted, and the civil scorn of the class into which he intruded himself, were marked in very significant ways. The elector of Saxony at first refused to acknowledge the new majesty. Louis the Fourteenth looked down on his brother king with an air not unlike that with which the count in Molière's play regards Monsieur Jourdain, just fresh from the mummery of being made a gentleman. Austria exacted large sacrifice in return for her recognition, and at last gave it ungraciously.

The Prussian monarchy, the youngest of the great European states, but in population and in revenue the fifth amongst them, and in art, science, and civilization entitled to the third, if not the second place, sprang from an humble | origin. About the beginning of the fifteenth century, the marquisate of Brandenburg was bestowed by the Emperor Sigismund on the noble family of Hohenzollern. In the sixteenth century Frederic was succeeded by his son, Frederic that family embraced the Lutheran doctrines. William, a prince who must be allowed to Early in the seventeenth century it obtained have possessed some talents for administra from the King of Poland the investiture of the tion, but whose character was disfigured by duchy of Prussia. Even after this accession the most odious vices, and whose eccentriciof territory, the chiefs of the house of Hohen- ties were such as had never been seen out of a zollern hardly ranked with the Electors of Sax- madhouse. He was exact and diligent in the ony and Bavaria. The soil of Brandenburg transaction of business, and he was the first was for the most part sterile. Even round who formed the design of obtaining for PrusBerlin, the capital of the province, and round sia a place among the European powers, altoPotsdam, the favourite residence of the Mar-gether out of proportion to her extent and graves, the country was a desert. In some tracts, the deep sand could with difficulty be forced by assiduous tillage to yield thin crops of rye and oats. In other places, the ancient forests, from which the conquerors of the Roman empire had descended on the Danube, remained untouched by the hand of man. Where the soil was rich it was generally marshy, and its insalubrity repelled the cultivators whom its fertility attracted. Frederic William, called the Great Elector, was the prince to whose policy his successors have agreed to ascribe their greatness. He acquired by the peace of Westphalia several valuable possessions, and among them the rich city and district of Magdeburg; and he left to his son Frederic a principality as considerable as any which was not called a kingdom.

Frederic aspired to the style of royalty. Os*Frederic the Great and his Times. Edited, with an Introduction, by THOMAS CAMPBELL, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London 1842.

population, by means of a strong military organization. Strict economy enabled him to keep up a peace establishment of sixty thousand troops. These troops were disciplined in such a manner, that placed beside them, the household regiments of Versailles and St. James's would have appeared an awkward squad. The master of such a force could not but be regarded by all his neighbours as a formidable enemy, and a valuable ally.

But the mind of Frederic William was se ill-regulated, that all his inclinations became passions, and all his passions partook of the character of moral and intellectual disease. His parsimony degenerated into sordid avarice. His taste for military pomp and order became a mania, like that of a Dutch burgo master for tulips; or that of a member of the Roxburgh club for Caxtons. While the en such squalid poverty as moved the laughter voys of the court of Berlin were in a state of of foreign capitals; while the food placed be

fore the princes and the princesses of the brats. If he saw a clergyman staring at the blood-royal of Prussia was too scanty to ap- soldiers, he admonished the reverend gentlepease hunger, and so bad that even hunger man to betake himself to study and prayer, loathed it-no price was thought too extrava- and enforced this pious advice by a sound gant for tall recruits. The ambition of the caning, administered on the spot. But it was king was to form a brigade of giants, and in his own house that he was most unreasonaevery country was ransacked by his agents ble and ferocious. His palace was hell, and for men above the ordinary stature. These he the most execrable of fiends a cross beresearches were not confined to Europe. No tween Moloch and Puck. His son Frederic head that towered above the crowd in the ba- and his daughter Wilhelmina, afterwards Marzaars of Aleppo, of Cairo, or of Surat, could gravine of Bareuth, were in an especial manescape the crimps of Frederic William. One ner objects of his aversion. His own mind Irishman more than seven feet high, who was was uncultivated. He despised literature. He picked up in London by the Prussian ambas- hated infidels, Papists, and metaphysicians, sador, received a bounty of nearly 13001. ster- and did not very well understand in what they ling-very much more than the ambassador's differed from each other. The business of salary. This extravagance was the more ab- life, according to him, was to drill and to be surd, because a stout youth of five feet eight, | drilled. The recreations suited to a prince, who might have been procured for a few dol- were to sit in a cloud of tobacco-smoke, to sip lars, would in all probability have been a Swedish beer between the puffs of the pipe, to much more valuable soldier. But to Frederic play backgammon for three-halfpence a rubWilliam, this huge Irishman was what a brass ber, to kill wild hogs, and to shoot partridges Otho, or a Vinegar Bible, is to a collector of a by the thousand. The Prince-Royal showed different kind. little inclination either for the serious employ ments or for the amusements of his father. He shirked the duties of the parade-he detested the fume of tobacco-he had no taste either for backgammon or for field-sports. He had received from nature an exquisite ear, and performed skilfully on the flute. His earliest instructors had been French refugees, and they had awakened in him a strong passion for French literature and French society. Frederic Wil

It is remarkable, that though the main end of Frederic William's administration was to have a military force, though his reign forms an important epoch in the history of military discipline, and though his dominant passion was the love of military display, he was yet one of the most pacific of princes. We are afraid that his aversion to war was not the effect of humanity, but was merely one of his thousand whims. His feeling about his troops seems to have re-liam regarded these tastes as effeminate and sembled a miser's feeling about his money. He loved to collect them, to count them, to see them increase; but he could not find it in his heart to break in upon the precious hoard. He looked forward to some future time when his Patagonian battalions were to drive hostile infantry before them like sheep. But this future time was always receding; and it is probable that, if his life had been prolonged thirty years, his superb army would never have seen any harder service than a sham fight in the fields near Berlin. But the great military means which he had collected, were destined to be employed by a spirit far more daring and inventive than his own.

contemptible, and, by abuse and persecution, made them still stronger. Things became worse when the Prince-Royal attained that time of life at which the great revolution in the human mind and body takes place. He was guilty of some youthful indiscretions, which no good and wise parent would regard with severity. At a later period he was accused, truly or falsely, of vices, from which History averts her eyes, and which even Satire blushes to name-vices such that, to borrow the energetic language of Lord-Keeper Coventry, "the depraved nature of man, which of itself carrieth man to all other sin, abhorreth them." But the offences of his youth were not Frederic, surnamed the Great, son of Fre- characterized by any peculiar turpitude. They deric William, was born in January, 1712. It excited, however, transports of rage in the may safely be pronounced that he had received king, who hated all faults except those to from nature a strong and sharp understanding, which he was himself inclined; and who conand a rare firmness of temper and intensity ofceived that he made ample atonement to Heawill. As to the other parts of his character, it is difficult to say whether they are to be ascribed to nature, or to the strange training which he underwent. The history of his boyhood is painfully interesting. Oliver Twist in the parish workhouse, Smike at Dotheboys Hall, were petted children when compared with this wretched heir-apparent of a crown. The nature of Frederic William was hard and bad, and the habit of exercising arbitrary power had made him frightfully savage. His rage constantly vented itself to right and left in curses and blows. When his majesty took a walk, every human being fled before him, as if a tiger had broken loose from a menagerie. If he met a lady in the street, he gave her a kick, and told her to go home and mind her

ven for his brutality, by holding the softer passions in detestation. The Prince-Royal, too, was not one of those who are content to take their religion on trust. He asked puzzling questions, and brought forward arguments which seemed to savour of something different from pure Lutheranism. The king suspected that his son was inclined to be a heretic of some sort or other, whether Calvinist or Atheist his maj sty did not very well know. The or dinary malignity of Frederic William was bad enough. He now thought malignity a part of his duty as a Christian man, and all the con science that he had stimulated his hatred. The flute was broken-the French books were sent out of the palace-the prince was kicked, and cudgelled, an? pulled by the hair. At diu

French. With these inmates he dined and supped well, drank freely, and amused himself sometimes with concerts, sometimes with holding chapters of a fraternity which he called the Order of Bayard; but literature was his chief resource.

ner the plates were hurled at his head-some- | midst of the sandy waste of the Marquisate. times he was restricted to bread and water-The mansion, surrounded by woods of oak sometimes he was forced to swallow food so and beech, looks out upon a spacious lake. nauseous that he could not keep it on his sto- There Frederic amused himself by laying out mach. Once his father knocked him down, gardens in regular alleys and intricate mazes, dragged him along the floor to a window, and by building obelisks, temples, and conservawas with difficulty prevented from strangling tories, and by collecting rare fruits and flowers. him with the cord of the curtain. The queen, His retirement was enlivened by a few comfor the crime of not wishing to see her son panions, among whom he seems to have premurdered, was subjected to the grossest indig-ferred those who, by birth or extraction, were nities. The Princess Wilhelmina, who took her brother's part, was treated almost as ill as Mrs. Brownrigg's apprentices. Driven to despair, the unhappy youth tried to run away; then the fury of the old tyrant rose to madness. The prince was an officer in the army; his flight was therefore desertion, and, in the moral code of Frederic William, desertion was the highest of all crimes. Desertion," says this royal theologian, in one of his half-crazy letters, "is from hell. It is a work of the children of the devil. No child of God could possibly be guilty of it." An accomplice of the prince, in spite of the recommendation of a court-martial, was mercilessly put to death. It seemed probable that the prince himself would suffer the same fate. It was with difficulty that the intercession of the States of Holland, of the Kings of Sweden and Poland, and of the Emperor of Germany, saved the House of Brandenburgh from the stain of an unnatural murder. After months of cruel suspense, Frederic learned that his life would be spared. He remained, however, long a prisoner; but he was not on that account to be pitied. He found in his jailers a tenderness which he had never found in his father; his table was not sumptuous, but he had whole-comparatively an unimportant object. Even some food in sufficient quantity to appease hunger; he could read the Henriade without being kicked, and play on his flute without having it broken over his head.

His education had been entirely French. The long ascendency which Louis XIV. had enjoyed, and the eminent merit of the tragic and comic dramatists, of the satirists, and of the preachers who had flourished under that magnificent prince, had made the French language predominant in Europe. Even in coun tries which had a national literature, and wich could boast of names greater than those f Racine, of Molière, and of Massillon-in the country of Dante, in the country of Cervantes, in the country of Shakspeare and Milton-the intellectual fashions of Paris had been to a great extent adopted. Germany had not yet produced a single masterpiece of poetry or eloquence. In Germany, therefore, the French taste reigned without rival and without limit. Every youth of rank was taught to speak and write French. That he should speak and write his own tongue with politeness, or even with accuracy and facility, was regarded as

Frederic William, with all his rugged Saxon prejudices, thought it necessary that his chil dren should know French, and quite unnecessary that they should be well versed in German. The Latin was positively interdicted. "My

and, more than that, I will not suffer anybody even to mention such a thing to me." One of the preceptors ventured to read the Golden Bull in the original with the Prince-Royal. Frederic William entered the room, and broke out in his usual kingly style.

"Rascal, what are you at there?"

"Please your majesty," answered the pre ceptor, "I was explaining the Golden Bull to his royal highness."

When his confinement terminated, he was a man. He had nearly completed his twenty-son," his majesty wrote, " shall not learn Latin; first year, and could scarcely, even by such a parent as Frederic William be kept much longer under the restraints which had made nis boyhood miserable. Suffering had matured his understanding, while it had hardened his heart and soured his temper. He had learnt self-command and dissimulation; he affected to conform to some of his father's views, and submissively accepted a wife, who was a wife only in name, from his father's hand. He also served with credit, though without any oppor- "I'll Golden Bull you, you rascal!" roared tunity of acquiring brilliant distinction, under the majesty of Prussia. Up went the king's the command of Prince Eugene, during a cam- cane, away ran the terrified instructor, and paign marked by no extraordinary events. He Frederic's classical studies ended forever. was now permitted to keep a separate esta- He now and then affected to quote Latin senblishment, and was therefore able to indulge tences, and produced such exquisite Cicerowith caution his own tastes. Partly in order nian phrases as these:-"Stante pede morire,” to conciliate the king, and partly, no doubt," De gustibus non est disputandus,"—" Tot from inclination, he gave up a portion of his time to military and political business, and thus gradually acquired such an aptitude for affairs as his most intimate associates were not aware that he possessed.

His favourite abode was at Rheinsberg, near the frontier which separates the Prussian dominions from the duchy of Mecklenburg. Rheinsberg is a fertile and smiling spot, in the

verbas tot spondera." Of Italian, he had not enough to read a page of Metastasio with ease; and of the Spanish and English, he did not, as far as we are aware, understand a single word.

As the highest human compositions to which he had access were those of the French writers, it is not strange that his admiration for those writers should have been unbounded. His

It is not strange that a young man devoted to literature, and acquainted only with the literature of France, should have looked with profound veneration on the genius of Voltaire. Nor is it just to condemn him for this feeling. “A man who has never seen the sun," says Calderon in one of his charming comedies, "cannot be blamed for thinking that no glory can exceed that of the moon. A man who has seen neither moon nor sun, cannot be blamed for talking of the unrivalled brightness of the morning star." Had Frederic been able to read Homer and Milton, or even Virgil and Tasso, his admiration of the Henriade would prove that he was utterly destitute of the power of discerning what is excellent in art. Had he been familiar with Sophocles or Shakspeare, we should have expected him to appreciate Zaire more justly. Had he been able to study Thucydides and Tacitus in the original Greek and Latin, he would have known that there were heights in the eloquence of history far beyond the reach of the author of the Life of Charles the Twelfth. But the finest heroic poem, several of the most powerful tragedies, and the most brilliant and picturesque historical work that Frederic had ever read, were Voltaire's. Such high and various excellence moved the young prince almost to adoration. The opinions of Voltaire on religious and philosophical questions had not yet been fully exhibited to the public. At a later period, when an exile from his country, and at open war with the Church, he spoke out. But when Frederic was at Rheinsberg, Voltaire was still a courtier; and, though he could not always curb his petulant wit, he had as yet published nothing that could exclude him from Versailles, and little that a divine of the mild and generous school of Grotius and Tillotson might not read with pleasure. In the Henriade, in Zaire, and in Alzire, Christian piety is exhibited in the most amiable form, and, some years after the period of which we are writing, a Pope condescended to accept the dedication of Mahomet. The real senti ments of the poet, however, might be clearly perceived by a keen eye through the decent disguise with which he veiled them, and could not escape the sagacity of Frederic, who held similar opinions, and had been accustomed to practise similar dissimulation.

ambitious and eager temper early prompted | larly those which are written with earnestness, him to imitate what he admired. The wish, and are not embroidered with verses. perhaps, dearest to his heart was, that he might rank among the masters of French rhetoric and poetry. He wrote prose and verse as indefatigably as if he had been a starving hack of Cave or Osborn; but Nature, which had bestowed on him, in a large measure, the talents of a captain and of an administrator, had withheld from him those higher and rarer gifts, without which industry labours in vain to produce immortal eloquence or song. And, indeed, had he been blessed with more imagination, wit, and fertility of thought, than he appears to have had, he would still have been subject to one great disadvantage, which would, in all probability, have forever prevented him from taking a high place among men of letters. He had not the full command of any language. There was no machine of thought which he could employ with perfect ease, confidence, and freedom. He had German enough to scold his servants, or to give the word of command to his grenadiers; but his grammar and pronunciation were extremely bad. He found it difficult to make out the meaning even of the simplest German poetry On one occasion a version of Racine's Iphigénie was read to him. He held the French original in his hand; but was forced to own that, even with such help, he could not understand the translation. Yet though he had neglected his mother tongue in order to bestow all his attention on French, his French was, after all, the French of a foreigner. It was necessary for him to have always at his beck some men of letters from Paris to point out the solecisms and fake rhymes, of which, to the last, he was frequently guilty. Even had he possessed the poetic faculty-of which, as far as we can judge, he was utterly destitute-the want of a language would have prevented him from being a great poet. No noble work of imagination, as far as we recollect, was ever composed by any man, except in a dialect which he had learned without remembering how or when; and which he had spoken with perfect ease before he had ever analyzed its structure. Romans of great talents wrote Greek verses; but how many of those verses have deserved to live? Many men of eminent genius have, in modern times, written Latin poems; but, as far as we are aware, none of those poems, not even Milton's, can be ranked in the first The prince wrote to his idol in the style of a class of art, or even very high in the second. worshipper, and Voltaire replied with exquisite It is not strange, therefore, that in the French grace and address. A correspondence fellow. verses of Frederic, we can find nothing be-ed, which may be studied with advantage by yond the reach of any man of good parts and industry-nothing above the level of Newdigate and Seatonian poetry. His best pieces may perhaps rank with the worst in Dodsley's collection. In history, he succeeded better. We do not, indeed, find in any part of his voluminous Memoirs, either deep reflection or vivid painting. But the narrative is distinguished by clearness, conciseness, good sense, and a certain air of truth and simplicity, which is singularly graceful in a man who, having done great things, sits down to relate them. On the whole, however, none of his writings are so agreeable to us as his Letters; particuVOL IV.-64

those who wish to become proficients in the ignoble art of flattery. No man ever paid compliments better than Voltaire. His sweetened confectionary had always a delicate, yet stimulating flavour, which was delightful to palates wearied by the coarse preparations of inferior artists. It was only from his hand that so much sugar could be swallowed without making the swallower sick. Copies of verses, writing-desks, trinkets of amber, were changed between the friends. Frederic confided his writings to Voltaire, and Voltaire applauded, as if Frederic had been Racine and Bossuet in one. One of his royal highness.

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