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There were, indeed, a few who did not as is rarely enjoyed by those who attain sympathize with the general feeling. such an age. At length, on the twentyOne or two of the managers of the im- second of August, 1818, in the eightypeachment were present. They sate sixth year of his age, he met death in the same seats which they had oc- with the same tranquil and decorous cupied when they had been thanked fortitude which he had opposed to all for the services which they had ren- the trials of his various and eventful life. dered in Westminster Hall: for, by the With all his faults,-and they were courtesy of the House, a member who neither few nor small,-only one cehas been thanked in his place is consi-metery was worthy to contain his redered as having a right always to oc- mains. In that temple of silence and cupy that place. These gentlemen reconciliation where the enmities of were not disposed to admit that they twenty generations lie buried, in the had employed several of the best years Great Abbey which has during many of their lives in persecuting an innocent ages afforded a quiet resting-place to man. They accordingly kept their those whose minds and bodies have seats, and pulled their hats over their been shattered by the contentions of brows; but the exceptions only made the Great Hall, the dust of the illusthe prevailing enthusiasm more re-trious accused should have mingled markable. The Lords received the with the dust of the illustrious accusers. old man with similar tokens of respect. This was not to be. Yet the place of The University of Oxford conferred on interment was not ill chosen. Behind. him the degree of Doctor of Laws; the chancel of the parish church of and, in the Sheldonian Theatre, the Daylesford, in earth which already undergraduates welcomed him with held the bones of many chiefs of the tumultuous cheering. house of Hastings, was laid the coffin These marks of public esteem were of the greatest man who has ever soon followed by marks of royal fa- borne that ancient and widely extended vour. Hastings was sworn of the name. On that very spot probably, Privy Council, and was admitted to a fourscore years before, the little Warlong private audience of the Prince ren, meanly clad and scantily fed, had Regent, who treated him very gra- played with the children of ploughciously. When the Emperor of Rus- men. Even then his young mind had sia and the King of Prussia visited revolved plans which might be called England, Hastings appeared in their romantic. Yet, however romantic, it train both at Oxford and in the Guild- is not likely that they had been so hall of London, and, though sur- strange as the truth. Not only had rounded by a crowd of princes and the poor orphan retrieved the fallen great warriors, was every where re- fortunes of his line-not only had he ceived with marks of respect and ad- repurchased the old lands, and rebuilt miration. He was presented by the the old dwelling-he had preserved Prince Regent both to Alexander and and extended an empire. He had to Frederic William; and his Royal founded a polity. He had adminisHighness went so far as to declare in tered government and war with more public that honours far higher than a than the capacity of Richelieu. He seat in the Privy Council were due, had patronised learning with the juand would soon be paid, to the man dicious liberality of Cosmo. He had who had saved the British dominions been attacked by the most formidable in Asia. Hastings now confidently combination of enemies that ever sought expected a peerage; but, from some the destruction of a single victim; and unexplained cause, he was again dis-over that combination, after a struggle appointed. of ten years, he had triumphed. He

He lived about four years longer, in had at length gone down to his grave the enjoyment of good spirits, of facul- in the fulness of age, in peace, after so ties not impaired to any painful or many troubles, in honour, after so much degrading extent, and of health such | obloquy,

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FREDERIC THE GREAT.

(APRIL, 1842.)

Those who look on his character | population and revenue the fifth among without favour or malevolence will pro- them, and in art, science, and civilisanounce that, in the two great elements tion entitled to the third, if not to the of all social virtue, in respect for the second place, sprang from a humble rights of others, and in sympathy for origin. About the beginning of the the sufferings of others, he was de- fifteenth century, the marquisate of ficient. His principles were somewhat Brandenburg was bestowed by the lax. His heart was somewhat hard. Emperor Sigismund on the noble family But though we cannot with truth de- of Hohenzollern. In the sixteenth censcribe him either as a righteous or as a tury that family embraced the Lutheran merciful ruler, we cannot regard with- doctrines. It obtained from the King out admiration the amplitude and fer- of Poland, early in the seventeenth tility of his intellect, his rare talents century, the investiture of the duchy of for command, for administration, and Prussia. Even after this accession of for controversy, his dauntless courage, territory, the chiefs of the house of his honourable poverty, his fervent zeal Hohenzollern hardly ranked with the for the interests of the state, his noble Electors of Saxony and Bavaria. The equanimity, tried by both extremes of soil of Brandenburg was for the most fortune, and never disturbed by either. part sterile. Even round Berlin, the capital of the province, and round Potsdam, the favourite residence of the Margraves, the country was a desert. In some places, the deep sand could with difficulty be forced by assiduous tillage to yield thin crops of rye and Frederic the Great and his Times. Edited, oats. In other places, the ancient fowith an Introduction, by THOMAS CAMP-rests, from which the conquerors of the BELL, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1842. Roman empire had descended on the THIS work, which has the high honour Danube, remained untouched by the of being introduced to the world by hand of man. Where the soil was rich the author of Lochiel and Hohenlin- it was generally marshy, and its insaden, is not wholly unworthy of so dis-lubrity repelled the cultivators whom tinguished a chaperon. It professes, its fertility attracted. Frederic Wilindeed, to be no more than a compila- liam, called the Great Elector, was the tion; but it is an exceedingly amusing prince to whose policy his successors compilation, and we shall be glad to have agreed to ascribe their greatness. have more of it. The narrative comes He acquired by the peace of Westdown at present only to the commence-phalia several valuable possessions, and ment 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 opporFrederic aspired to the style of roy tunity of presenting them with a slight alty. Ostentatious and profuse, negsketch of the life of the greatest king ligent of his true interests and of his that has, in modern times, succeeded high duties, insatiably eager for frivoby right of birth to a throne. It may, lous distinctions, he added nothing to we fear, be impossible to compress so the real weight of the state which he long and eventful a story within the governed: perhaps he transmitted his limits which we must prescribe to our- inheritance to his children impaired selves. Should we be compelled to rather than augmented in value; but break off, we may perhaps, when the he succeeded in gaining the great obcontinuation of this work appears, re-ject of his life, the title of King. In turn to the subject. the year 1700 he assumed this new The Prussian monarchy, the youngest dignity. He had on that occasion to of the great European states, but in undergo all the mortifications which

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.

fall to the lot of ambitious upstarts. of a member of the Roxburghe Club Compared with the other crowned heads for Caxtons. While the envoys of the of Europe, he made a figure resembling Court of Berlin were in a state of such that which a Nabob or a Commissary, squalid poverty as moved the laughter who had bought a title, would make in of foreign capitals, while the food placed the company of Peers whose ancestors before the princes and princesses of the had been attainted for treason against blood-royal of Prussia was too scanty the Plantagenets. The envy of the to appease hunger, and so bad that even class which Frederic quitted, and he hunger loathed it, no price was thought civil scorn of the class into which he too extravagant for tall recruits. The intruded himself, were marked in very ambition of the King was to form a significant ways. The Elector of Saxony brigade of giants, and every country at first refused to acknowledge the new was ransacked by his agents for men Majesty. Lewis the Fourteenth looked above the ordinary stature. These redown on his brother King with an air searches were not confined to Europe. not unlike that with which the Count No head that towered above the crowd in Molière's play regards Monsieur in the bazaars of Aleppo, of Cairo, or Jourdain, just fresh from the mum- of Surat, could escape the crimps of mery of being made a gentleman. Frederic William. One Irishman more Austria exacted large sacrifices in re- than seven feet high, who was picked turn for her recognition, and at last up in London by the Prussian ambasgave it ungraciously. sador, received a bounty of near thirteen hundred pounds sterling, very much more than the ambassador's salary. This extravagance was the more absurd, because a stout youth of five feet eight, 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 Otho, or a Vinegar Bible, is to a collector of a different kind.

Frederic was succeeded by his son, Frederic William, a prince who must be allowed to have possessed some talents for administration, but whose character was disfigured by odious vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never before been seen out of a madhouse. He was exact and diligent in the transacting of business; and he was the first who formed the design of obtaining for Prussia a place among the European powers, alto- It is remarkable, that though the gether out of proportion to her extent main end of Frederic William's adand population, by means of a strong ministration was to have a great milimilitary organization. Strict economy tary force, though his reign forms an enabled him to keep up a peace estab-important epoch in the history of mililishment 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 so il 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 burgomaster for tulips, or that

tary 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 resembled 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 between the puffs of the pipe, to play superb army would never have seen any backgammon for three halfpence a harder service than a sham fight in the rubber, to kill wild hogs, and to shoot fields near Berlin. But the great mili-partridges by the thousand. The Prince tary means which he had collected were Royal showed little inclination either destined to be employed by a spirit far for the serious employments or for the more daring and inventive than his own. amusements of his father. He shirked Frederic, surnamed the Great, son of the duties of the parade: he detested Frederic William, was born in January, the fume of tobacco: he had no taste 1712. It may safely be pronounced either for backgammon or for field that he had received from nature a sports. IIe had an exquisite ear, and strong and sharp understanding, and a performed skilfully on the flute. His rare firmness of temper and intensity earliest instructors had been French of will. As to the other parts of his refugees, and they had awakened in character, it is difficult to say whether him a strong passion for French litethey are to be ascribed to nature, or to rature and French society. Frederic the strange training which he under-William regarded these tastes as effewent. The history of his boyhood is minate and contemptible, and, by painfully interesting. Oliver Twist in abuse and persecution, made them still the parish workhouse, Smike at Dothe-stronger. Things became worse when boys Hall, were petted children when the Prince Royal attained that time of compared with this wretched heir ap-life at which the great revolution in parent of a crown. The nature of the human mind and body takes place. 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 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

He was guilty of some youthful indis-
cretions, which no good and wise pa-
rent 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 na-
ture 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 turpi-
tude. They excited, however, trans-
ports 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
scemed to savour of something dif
ferent from pure Lutheranism. The
King suspected that his son was in-
clined to be a heretic of some sort
or other, whether Calvinist or Atheist'
his Majesty did not very well know.
The ordinary malignity of Frederic,
William was bad enough.
He now
thought malignity a part of his duty

!

tured 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 opportunity of acquiring brilliant distinction, under the command of Prince Eugene, during a campaign marked by no extraordinary events. He was now permitted to keep a separate establishment, and was therefore able to indulge with caution his own tastes. Partly in order to conciliate the King, and partly, no doubt, 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.

as a Christian man, and all the con- When his confinement terminated science that he had stimulated his ha- he was a man. He had nearly comtred. The flute was broken: thepleted his twenty-first year, and could French books were sent out of the scarcely be kept much longer under palace: the Prince was kicked and the restraints which had made his boycudgelled, and pulled by the hair. At hood miserable. Suffering had madinner the plates were hurled at his head sometimes he was restricted to bread and water: sometimes he was forced to swallow food so nauseous that he could not keep it on his stomach. Once his father knocked him down, dragged him along the floor to a window, and was with difficulty prevented from strangling him with the cord of the curtain. The Queen, for the crime of not wishing to see her son murdered, was subjected to the grossest indignities. 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 His favourite abode was at Rheinshell. It is a work of the children of berg, near the frontier which separates the Devil. No child of God could pos- the Prussian dominions from the Duchy sibly be guilty of it." An accomplice of Mecklenburg. Rheinsberg is a ferof the Prince, in spite of the recom- tile and smiling spot, in the midst of mendation of a court martial, was mer- the sandy waste of the Marquisate. cilessly put to death. It seemed pro- The mansion, surrounded by woods of bable that the Prince himself would oak and beech, looks out upon a spasuffer the same fate. It was with dif- cious lake. There Frederic amused ficulty that the intercession of the States himself by laying out gardens in reguof Holland, of the Kings of Sweden lar alleys and intricate mazes, by buildand Poland, and of the Emperor of ing obelisks, temples, and conservaGermany, saved the House of Bran- tories, and by collecting rare fruits denburg from the stain of an unnatural and flowers. His retirement was enmurder. After months of cruel sus-livened by a few companions, among pense, 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 gaolers 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 could play on his flute without having it broken over his head.

whom he seems to have preferred those who, by birth or extraction, were French. With these inmates he dined and supped well, drank freely, and amused himself sometimes with concerts, and sometimes with holding chapters of a fraternity which he called the Order of Bayard; but literature was his chief resource.

His education had been entirely French. The long ascendency which Lewis the Fourteenth had enjoyed, and

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