with marked favour. Fox had been a principal manager of the impeachment. To Pitt it was owing that there had been an impeachment; and Hastings, we fear, was on this occasion guided by personal considerations, rather than by a regard to the public interest. The last twenty-four years of his life were chiefly passed at Daylesford. He amused himself with embellishing his grounds, riding fine Arab horses, fattening prize-cattle, and trying to rear Indian animals and vegetables in Eng The general feeling both of the Directors and of the proprietors of the East India Company was, that he had great claims on them, that his services to them had been eminent, and that his misfortunes had been the effect of his zeal for their interests. His friends in Leadenhall street, proposed to reimburse him for the costs of his trial, and to settle on him an annuity of five thousand pounds a year. But the consent of the Board of Control was required; and at the head of the Board of Control was Mr. Dundas, who had himself been a party to the im-land. He sent for seeds of a very fine custard peachment, who had, on that account, been reviled with great bitterness by the partisans of Hastings, and who, therefore, was not in a very complying mood. He refused to consent to what the Directors suggested. The Directors remonstrated. A long controversy followed. Hastings, in the mean time, was reduced to such distress that he could hardly pay his weekly bills. At length a compromise was made. An annuity of four thousand a year was settled on Hastings; and, in order to enable him to meet pressing demands, he was to receive ten years' annuity in advance. The Company was also permitted to lend him fifty thousand pounds, to be repaid by instalments, without interest. This relief, though given in the most absurd manner, was sufficient to enable the retired governor to live in comfort, and even in luxury, if he had been a skilful manager. But he was careless and profuse, and was more than once under the necessity of applying to the Company for assistance, which was liberally given. apple, from the garden of what had once been his own villa, among the green hedgerows of Allipore. He tried also to naturalize in Wor cestershire the delicious lecchee, almost the only fruit of Bengal, which deserves to be re gretted even amidst the plenty of Covent-Gar den. The Mogul emperors, in the time of their greatness, had in vain attempted to introduce into Hindostan the goat of the table-land of Thibet, whose down supplies the looms d Cashmere with the materials of the fine shawls. Hastings tried, with no better forta. to rear a breed at Daylesford; nor does be seem to have succeeded better with the cattle of Bootan, whose tails are in high esteem as the best fans for brushing away the musquitoes. Literature divided his attention with his conservatories and his menagerie. He had always loved books, and they were now necessary t him. Though not a poet, in any high sense of the word, he wrote neat and polished lines with great facility, and was fond of exercising this talent. Indeed, if we must speak out, be seems to have been more of a Trissotin tha was to be expected from the powers of his mind, and from the great part which he ba played in life. We are assured in these Me He had security and affluence, but not the power and dignity, which, when he landed from India, he had reason to expect. He had then looked forward to a coronet, a red riband, a seat at the Council-board, an office at White-moirs, that the first thing which he did in the hall. He was then only fifty-two, and might hope for many years of bodily and mental vigour. The case was widely different when he left the bar of the Lords. He was now too old a man to turn his mind to a new class of studies and duties. He had no chance of receiving any mark of royal favour while Mr. Pitt remained in power; and, when Mr. Pitt retired, Hastings was approaching his seven-ment. tieth year. Once, and only once, after his acquittal, he interfered in politics, and that interference was not much to his honour. In 1804, he exerted himself strenuously to prevent Mr. Addington, against whom. Fox and Pitt had combined, from resigning the Treasury. It is difficult to believe that a man so able and energetic as Hastings, can have thought that, when Bonaparte was at Boulogne with a great army, the defence of our island could safely be intrusted to a ministry which did not contain a single person whom flattery could describe as a great statesman. It is also certain that, on the important question which had raised Mr. Addington to power, and on which he differed from both Fox and Pitt, Hastings, as might nave been expected, agreed with Fox and Pitt, and was decidedly opposed to Addington. Religious intolerance has never been the vice of the India service, and certainly was not the vice of Hastings. But Mr. Addington had treated him morning was to compose a copy of verses When the family and guests assembled. th poem made its appearance as regularly as the eggs and rolls; and Mr. Gleig requires us believe that, if from any accident Hastag came to the breakfast-table without one of charming performances in his hand, the on sion was felt by all as a grievous disappor Tastes differ widely. For ourselves we must say that, however good the breakfas at Daylesford may have been-and we are as sured that the tea was of the most aromati flavour, and that neither tongue nor venison pasty was wanting-we should have though the reckoning hig 甘薯 T aed been forced earn our repast by madrigal or sonne are glad, however,'' ' very day to a new by our host. We ig has preserved er. though we think i good to be often of human na Whout wonder o hich are found i 1 s in old times. 1.h capacity an he greatest a es and affects s. These gre irers of Has im reduced Sewards. With all his fa ilts-and they were neither few nor small-only one cemetery was worthy to contain his remains. In that temple of silence and reconciliation, where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the Great Abbey which has for ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall, the dust of the illustrious accused should have been mingled with the dust of the illustrious accusers. This was not to be. Yet the place of interment was not ill chosen. Behind the chancel of the parish-church of Daylesford, in earth which already held the bones of many chiefs of the house of Hastings, was laid the coffin of the greatest man who has ever borne that ancient and widely extended name. On that very spot probably, fourscore years before, the little Warren, meanly clan and scantily fed, had played with the children of ploughmen. Even then his young mind had revolved plans which might be called romantic. Yet, however romantic, it is not like When Hastings had passed many years in He lived about four years longer in the enretirement, 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 read his answer to the charges which Burke had laid on the table. Since that time twentyseven years had elapsed; public feeling had undergone a complete change; the nation had now forgotten his faults, and remembered only his services. The reappearance, too of a man who had been among the most distinguished of a generation that had passed away, who now belonged to history, and who seemed to have de risen from the dead, could not but produce a solemn and pathetic effect. The Commons received him with acclamations, ordered a dchair to be set for him, and when he retired, berose and uncovered. There were, indeed, a few who did not sympathize with the general feeling. One or two of the managers of the heimpeachment were present. They sat in the same seats which they had occupied when they had been thanked for the services which they He had rendered in Westminster Hall; for, by the Courtesy of the House, a member who has been thanked in his place, is considered as having a right 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 had employed several of the best years of their lives in persecuting an innocent man. They accordingly kept their seats, and pulled their hats over their brows; but the exceptions only made the prevailing enthusiasm more remarkable. The Lords received the old man with similar tokens of respect. The University of Oxford conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws; and, in the Sheldonian theatre, the under-graduates welcomed him with tumultuous cheering. These marks of public esteem were soon ollowed 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 every where 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. Not only had the poor orphan retrieved the fallen fortunes of his line. Not only had he repurchased the old lands, and rebuilt the old dwelling. He had preserved and extended an empire. He had founded a polity. He had administered government and war with more than the capacity of Richelieu; and had patronised learning with the judicious liberality of Cosmo. He had been attacked by the most formidable combination of enemies that ever sought the destruction of a single victim; and 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. 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 sympathy 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. It may not be unacceptable to our readers that we should take this opportunity of presenting 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. 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 inheri tance 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 upstarts. Compared with the other crowned heads of Europe, he made a figure resembling that which a Nabob or a Commissary, who had bought a title, would make in the com pany of Peers whose ancestors had been at tainted for treason against the Plantagenets. exacted large sacrifice in return for her re cognition, and at last gave it ungraciously. 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 The Prussian monarchy, the youngest of the refused to acknowledge the new majesty. great European states, but in population and Louis the Fourteenth looked down on his bro in revenue the fifth amongst them, and in art, ther king with an air not unlike that with science, and civilization entitled to the third, if which the count in Molière's play regards not the second place, sprang from an humble Monsieur Jourdain, just fresh from the mum origin. About the beginning of the fifteenth cen-mery of being made a gentleman. Austria tury, 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 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 eccentric of territory, the chiefs of the house of Hohen- ties were such as had never been seen out of 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 is was for the most part sterile. Even round who formed the design of obtaining for Pr Berlin, the capital of the province, and round sia a place among the European powers, al Potsdam, the favourite residence of the Mar-gether out of proportion to her extent and graves, the country was a desert. In some population, by means of a strong military of tracts, the deep sand could with difficulty beganization. Strict economy enabled him to 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. keep up a peace establishment of sixty thou sand troops. These troops were disciplined in such a manner, that placed beside them the household regiments of Versailles and & James's would have appeared an awkward squad. The master of such a force could no but be regarded by all his neighbours as a for midable enemy, and a valuable ally. But the mind of Frederic William was s ill-regulated, that all his inclinations becam passions, and all his passions partook of the character of moral and intellectual diseas His parsimony degenerated into sordid ara rice. His taste for military pomp and order became a mania, like that of a Dutch burge master for tulips; or that of a member of Roxburgh club for Caxtons. While the such squalid poverty as moved the laugh voys of the court of Berlin were in a state of of foreign capitals; while the food placed fore the princes and the princesses of the blood-ro al of Prussia was too scanty to appease hanger, and so bad that even hunger loathed t-no price was thought too extravagant for tall recruits. The ambition of the king was to form a brigade of giants, and every country was ransacked by his agents for men above the ordinary stature. These researches were not confined to Europe. No dhead that towered above the crowd in the baAzaars of Aleppo, of Cairo, or of Surat, could escape the crimps of Frederic William. One Irishman more than seven feet high, who was edpicked up in London by the Prussian ambassador, received a bounty of nearly 1300/. steredeling-very much more than the ambassador's be the salary. This extravagance was the more abser surd, because a stout youth of five feet eight, der who might have been procured for a few dollars, would in all probability have been a much more valuable soldier. But to Frederic William, this huge Irishman was what a brass 2 Otho, or a Vinegar Bible, is to a collector of a different kind. hat brats. If he saw a clergyman staring at the soldiers, he admonished the reverend gentleman to betake himself to study and prayer, and enforced this pious advice by a sound caning, administered on the spot. But it was in his own house that he was most unreasonable and ferocious. His palace was hell, and he the most execrable of fiends-a cross between Moloch and Puck. His son Frederic and his daughter Wilhelmina, afterwards Margravine of Bareuth, were in an especial manner objects of his aversion. His own mind was uncultivated. He despised literature. He hated infidels, Papists, and metaphysicians, and did not very well understand in what they differed from each other. The business of life, according to him, was to drill and to be drilled. The recreations suited to a prince, were to sit in a cloud of tobacco-smoke, to sip Swedish beer between the puffs of the pipe, to play backgammon for three-halfpence a rubber, to kill wild hogs, and to shoot partridges by the thousand. The Prince-Royal showed little inclination either for the serious employments 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 he 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 humakenity, 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 hiş 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. T Frederic, surnamed the Great, son of Frederic William, was born in January, 1712. It may safely be pronounced that he had received from nature a strong and sharp understanding, and a rare firmness of temper and intensity of will. 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 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 characterized by any peculiar turpitude. They excited, however, transports of rage in the king, who hated all faults except those to which he was himself inclined; and who conceived that he made ample atonement to Heaven 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 majesty 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, and pulled by the hair. At din 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 call ed 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 pre murdered, 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 wholesome 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 lar guage predominant in Europe. Even in cour tries which had a national literature, and which could boast of names greater than those of 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 of 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 comparatively an unimportant object. Even Frederic William, with all his rugged Saxon prejudices, thought it necessary that his children should know French, and quite unneces sary 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 his 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 doninions from the duchy of Mecklenburg. theinsberg 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 |