pittfator t/i0rintitt.

OCTOBER 2, 1858.

BOOKS.

CARLYLE'S LIFE OF FREDERICK THE GREAT.* Wr give an early welcome to these volumes. Their appearance is not only the event of the publishing season,—that were saying very little,—but it is of lasting literary moment. All that Mr. Carlyle writes at once takes its place among our standard English literature, without waiting for the suffrages of criticism, and is as sure to be read thoroughly and calmly studied generations hence as now. Lithrary, like all other prophecy, is dangerous, except when the chances of refutation are so distant as to be practically ad. With regard to Mr. Carlyle, however, his influence on his age, if nothing else, must always make him an object of in- terest to every other.

Among his numerous aversions, there is none more emphatic, or more frequently expressed, than his hatred and contempt for the eighteenth century. Yet it seems to have peculiar attractions for him as a writer. He hovers about it, tacitly owning a kind of fascination in it, which his words disclaim.

"The Eighteenth Century, it is well known does not figure to me," Ole says' in one of the earliest pages of his Friedrich,) "as a lovely one ; needing to be kept in mind, or spoken of unnecessarily. To sue the Eighteenth Century has nothing grand in it, except that grand universal Suicide, named French Revolution, by which it terminated its otherwise most worthless existence, with at least one worthy act ;—setting fire to its old home and self; and going up in flames and volcanic explosions, in a truly memorable and important manner." Vol. I. p. 11.

His History of the French Revolution has, therefore, a kind of exultant vindictiveness in it. It is, as it were, a dancing on the grave of a dead enemy,—a song of triumph over a "swindler century" driven "to blow its brains out and do at length one true action."

But although proclaiming that this ill-omened century deserves to be forgotten, in all except its extinction Mr. Carlyle has done his best to prevent its being forgotten. irony of his most ad- mirable essays refer to personages conspicuous in it. He now avers that its only notable men were Frederick and Voltaire, "its chief and, in a sense, its sole products" (vol. II. p. 578) ; but his own writings will not suffer us to forget Richter, Schiller, Novalis, Heyne, Rousseau, Diderot, Johnson, Burns, and many others. The work, of which the first instalment is now before us, in tracing the fortunes of its hero through nearly fourscore years of the hundred, only "worthy of being hidden and forgotten," must revive for us their main events and. features, moral and social. Frederick cannot be understood. apart from his time, nor his time without reference to the impress stamped upon it, and the impulse given it by Frederick. Mr. Carlyle is destined, in spite of him- self, and with many expressions of disgust, to write the history of the eighteenth century, and to insure it against the oblivion with which he threatens it.

Mr. Carlyle is attracted to Frederick as the last real King and Governor of men,—in opposition to "crowned phantasms,"— whom the world has seen. The true king is, in his eyes much what the ideal "wise man" was in that of stoic philosoPhers—• the "bright consummate flower" of human excellence. Frederick, he admits, is but an approximation towards this perfection,— often only a very &latent one, but still he is an approximation,— and as such himself and his doings deserve more truthful record than they have yet had. Part of his biographer's task will be the vindication of Frederick's memory from the imputations tO which national hostility gave currency in England, during the war of the Austrian succession. To the "public opinion" of that date he was much what the Emperor Nicholas became, rather more than a century later, a by-word for political treachery and unscrupulous self-seeking. Mr. Carlyle promises to show us the falsehood of this notion, which has been perpetuated to our own times, and to clear away the aspersions which the angry book of Voltaire— Vie Prjvé elm Roi de Prusse—has thrown upon Frederick's personal character.

These two first volumes describe the first eight-and-twenty years only of their hero's life. Frederick, as Crown-Prince, is Placed before us. The narrative concludes with the death of his fAather, and his own accession, on the last day of May 1740. bout half of the first volume, however, is devoted to an account

the house of Hohenzollern, and the Margravate of Branden-

,onrg, from their first emergence into history down to Frederick's °Pt, in 1712. This portion of the work unrols before our eyes a 1' eh and vivid panorama of the successive centuries. Men, with tnetr actions and the theatre of them, live again for the moment on the canvass as it fleets by. The hurry and bustle of real life animates the

looks and story,—thee confused passions and entangled motives, every th e rest that awaits tones and gestures of actors, whom silence and all the weary have long since overtaken-

, *zr,f8tog of Friedrich the &cossd, cal Thomas V'. Vole. and II. Published by Chapman and. Hall. Great. 337

NONTELY SUPPLEMENT]

are shown us as in a wizard's glass. The men of bygone days are no longer dreary historic spectres, the shadows of names, but hu- man beings, once more, of flesh and blood, like ourselves.

Brandenburg was first brought into connexion with the Ger- man empire by Henry the Fowler, who, in the year 928, conquered the savage Wends, and established among them "a warden and ninth-man garrison." We pass over the "shadowy lines" of Witekind, Ditnzarsa-Stade and Ascanien-Ballendstadt Mar- graves of Brandenburg. More than two centuries later, we meet with the first of the Hohenzollerns who has left trace of himself in history,—Conrad, "lineal ancestor, twentieth in direct ascent," of Frederick the Great. A junior of his family with but "small outlooks" in the world, he sought service, as a soldier of fortune with Kaiser Barbarossa, who, for his deserts, made him Burg- graf of Niirnburg, about the year 1170, A D. Henceforth the Hohenzollerns, having found ground on which to plant their feet, became gradually more and more of a power in Germany. In 1248, the Duke of Moran had been suddenly "done to death" by a certain wedded gentleman, for "signally violating the seventh commandment at his expense." Friedrich III. of the NUrnburg Burggraves, had married the murdered Duke's sister, and in the scramble for his possessions which ensued on his death, managed. to make himself master of Baireuth. " Onolzbach, (Onz-bach or brook,' now called Anspach) they [the Hohenzollerns] got some fourscore years after, by purchase and hard money down ('24,000 pounds of farthings,' whatever that may be), which proved a notable twin possession of the family. And then in some seven years more (A.D. 1388), the big Orlamfinde people having at length, as was too usual, fallen considerably insolvent, sold Plassenburg Castle itself, the. Plassenburg with its Town of Culmbach and dependencies to the Hohenzollern Burggraves, who had always ready-money about them." (Vol. I. pp. 135-6.) These acquisitions, collectively, made up the Margraviate or Princi- pality of Culmbach. In the year 1415, after centuries of mis- rule under Bavarian and Luxembourg Electors, Brandenburg also passed. by purchase into the hands of Burggraf Friedrich VI. of Niirnburg and his posterity. He had. held it in pawn before, from the needy Emperor Sigismund, and had administered it as Stattholder. Now it was fairly sold him. The ceremony of investiture took place, with great pomp, at Constance, on the 17th of April, 1417. "Moribund Brandenburg has got its Hohen- zollern Kiniurst," and with him a new lease of life. Here Prus- sian History, properly so called, begins. We must refer those who wish to trace its course to Mr. Carlyle. The Hohenzollerns, by dint of the strong arm and sagacious brain, by substantial justice and exemplary severity, knew how to consolidate and govern, as well as to acquire territory. Two centuries after the date last mentioned (in the year 1618) Johann Sigismund, ninth Kurfurst (Electoral Prince) of Brandenburg, obtained possession of the Dutchy of Prussia, in virtue of a Treaty of Co-enfeftment, entered into 1568. His successor, George Wilhelm, the tenth Kurfurst, whose lot fate cast in the troubled times of the Thirty Years' War, achieved only reverses and losses, which it was the part of his son Friedrich Wilhelm " the Great Elector" to re- trieve. He succeeded to his heritage in 1640, just a hundred. years before the accession of his great grandson, " Friedrich the Second, called Frederick the Great." "Of all his Ancestors, our aittle Fritz, when he grew big, admired this one. A man made like himself in many points. He seems really to have loved and honoured this one. In the year 1750 there had been a new Cathedral got finished at Berlin ; the ancestral bones had to be shifted over from the vaults of the old one. * * * * King Friedrich, with some attend- ants, witnessed the operation, January 1750. When the great Kurfurst's coffin came, he made them open it ; gazed in silence on the features for some time, which were perfectly recognizable ; laid his hand on the hand long-dead, and said, 'Messieurs, celui-ei a fait de grandes chases.' (This one did a great work.)" (Vol. I. pp. 361-2.)

At the peace of Westphalia, in 1648, the "Great Elector" ob- tained possession, not as he claimed, of Pommern, (Pomerania,) but only of Hinder-Pommern, and of " three secularized bishop- rics, Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Minden, with other small rem- nants." These last were granted. him in compensation for Fore- Pommern, which, "with some towns and cuttings over and above,"—Stettin among them,—was made over to Sweden, and. henceforth known as Swedish Pomerania. He conquered it after- wards, but, at the intervention of Louis XIV. of France, had to give it back again. Nor could he make good his claims upon the Silesian Duchies of Liegnitz, Brieg, and Wohlau, which, valid or not, were revived to such good purpose by Frederick the Great. His duchy of East Prussia was released by the Polish King John Casimir from the homage it had previously paid, and became sovereign. "On the whole," says Mr. Carlyle, "by constant energy, vigilance, adroit activity, by an ever-ready insight and audacity to seize the passing fact by its right handle, he fought his way well in the world ; left Brandenburg a flourishing and §reatly-increased Country, and his own name famous enough."

"Fighting hero, had the Public known it, was not his essential charac- ter, though he had to fight a great deal. He was essentially an Industrial man ; great in organizing, regulating, in constraining chaotic heaps to be- come cosmic for him. He drains bogs, settles colonies in the waste-places of his Dominions, cuts canals ; unweariedly enoourages trade and work. The Friedrich-Wilhelm's Canal, which still carries tonnage from the Oder to the Spree, is a monument of his zeal in this way ; creditable, with the means he had. To the poor French Protestants, in the Edict-of-Nantes Affair, he was like an express Benefit of Heaven : one Helper appointed to whom the help itself was profitable. He munificently welcomed them to Brandenburg ; showed really a noble piety and human pity, as well as judgment ; nor did Brandenburg and he want their reward. Some 20,000 nimble French souls, evidently of the best French quality, found a home there ;—made waste sands about Berlin into potherb gardens ' ; and in the spiritual Brandenburg, too, did something of horticulture, which is still noticeable." (Vol. I. pp. 352-4.)

His son and successor, reaping what the other had sown, though not casting much seed himself for the future, converted the Electoral into a Royal crown. He was the first King of Prussia,—by name and desicmation Friedrich I. His wife is more memorable than he—Sophia Charlotte, daughter of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, and sister to our King George I. Her love of letters and lettered men, her scepticism in religion and philosophy, are a kind of foreshadowing of one side at leastof her grandson's character.

"She . . . . had the sage Leibnitz [irreverently described by Mr. Carlyle as "a rather weak, but hugely ingenious old gentleman, with bright eyes and long nose, with vast black peruke, and bandy legs,") often,vrith her, at Berlin ; no end to her questionings of him ; eagerly desirous to draw water from that deep well,—a wet rope, with cobwebs sticking; to it, too often all she got, endless rope and the bucket never coming in view. Which, how- ever, she took patiently, as a thing according to Nature. She had her learned Beausobres and other Reverend Edict-a-Nantes gentlemen, famed Berlin divines ; whom, if any Papist notability, Jesuit ambassador or the like, happened to be there, she would set disputing with him, in the Soiree at Charlottenburg. She could right well preside over such a battle of the Cloud-Titans, and conduct the lightnings softly without explosion." (Vol. I. p. 46.) Beyond doubt, a bright airy lady shining in mild radiance in those Northern parts; very graceful, very witty and ingenious ; skilled to speak, skilled to hold her tongue—which latter art also was frequently in requisi- tion with her. She did not much venerate her Husband, nor the Court population, male or female, whom he chose to have about him : his and their ways were by no means hers if she had cared to publish her thoughts. Friedrich I., it is admitted on all hands, was an expensive Herr ;' much given to magnificent ceremonies' etiquettes and solemnities ; making no great way anywhither, and that always with noise enough, and with a dust-vortex of courtier-intrigues and cabals encircling him,—from which it is better to stand suite to windward. Moreover he was slightly crooked ; most sensitive, thin of skin and liable to sudden flaws of temper, though at heart very kind and good. Sophie Charlotte is she who wrote once, 'Leib- nitz talked to me of the infinitely little (de l'infiniment petit): Mon Idea! as if I did not know enough of that!' * * * * Leibnitz found her of an almost troublesome sharpness of intellect ; wants to know the why, even of the why,' says Leibnitz." (Vol. I. pp. 50-1.)

The following incident from the coronation of King Friedrich I. and Queen Sophie Charlotte is significant in its very slightness-

" At one turn of the proceedings, Bishop This and Chancellor That droning their empty grandiloquences at discretion, Sophie Charlotte was distinctly seen to smuggle out her snuff-box, being addicted to that rakish practice' and fairly solace herself with a delicate little pinch of snuff. Rasped tobacco, taboo rd**, called by mortals rape or rupee: there is no doubt about it; and the new King himself noticed her, and hurled back a look of due fulminancy, which could not help the matter, and was only lost in air. A memorable little action, and almost symbolic in the first Prussian Coronation. Yes, we are Kings and are got so near the stars, not nearer; and you invoke the gods in that tremendously longwinded manner, and I— Heavens, I have my snuff-box by me, at least !' Thou wearied patient Heroine ; cognizant of the infinitely little !—This symbolic pinch of snuff is fragrant all along in Prussian History. A fragrancy of humble verity in the middle of all revel or other ostentations ; inexorable, quiet protest against cant, done willa such simplicity : Sophie Charlotte's symbolic pinch of snuff. She was always considered something of a Republican Queen."

(Vol. I. pp. 62-3.) •

Friedrich Wilhelm, the second King of Prussia, and father of Frederick the Great, was her son. The following anecdotes of his childhood are amusing in themselves, and prefigure his manly character.

During a visit to his Electoral uncle in Hanover, "he got no improve- ment in breeding, as we intimated : none at all ; fought, on the contrary, with his young Cousin, (afterwards our George II.), a boy twice his age, though of weaker bone ; and gave him a bloody nose. To the scandal and consternation of the French Protestant gentlewomen and court-dames in their stiff silks : Ahee, your Electoral Highness !' This had been a rough unruly boy from the first discovery of him. At a very early stage, he, one meriting, while the nurses were dressing him, took to investigating one of his shoe-buckles ; would, in spite of remonstrances, slobber it about in his mouth ; and at length swallowed it down,—beyond mistake ; and the whole world cannot get it up ! Whereupon, wild wail of nurses ; and his Mother came screaming,' poor mother :—it is the same small shoe-buckle which is still shown, with a ticket and date to it, 31 December, 1692,' in the Berlin 1Cuusthanuner : for it turned out harmless, after all the screaming ; and a few grains of rhubarb restored it safely to the light of day; hence- forth, a thrice-memorable shoe-buckle.

"Another time, it is recorded, though with less precision of detail, his Governess the Dame Montbail having ordered him to do something which was intolerable to the princely mind, the princely mind resisted in a very strange way : the princely body, namely, flung itself suddenly out of a third-story window, nothing but the hands left within ; and hanging on there by the sill, and resolute to obey gravitation rather than Mentbail, soon brought the poor lady to terms. Upon which, indeed, he had been taken from her, and from the women altogether, as evidently now needing rougher government. Always an unruly fellow, and dangerous to trust among crockery. At Hanover he could do no good in the way of breeding : sage Leibnitz himself, with his big black periwig and large patient nose, could have put no metaphysics into such a boy. Sublime I'Modiede (Leib- nitzian justification of the ways of God' ) was not an article this indivi- dual had the least need of, nor at any time the least value for. 'Jus- tify ? What doomed dog questions it, then ? Are you for Bedlam, then ? ' —and in maturer years his rattan might have been dangerous ! For this was a singular individual of his day ; human soul still in robust health, and not given to spin its bowels into cobwebs." (Vol. I. pp. 36-7.) On the 28th of November 1706, this Prince married his Sophie Dorothee daughter of our George L, and had issue by her, Princess Wilhelmina, afterwards known by her memoir; as Margravine of Bursitis, two sons who died in infancy, and the a third who lived to be Frederick the Great, and afterwardil, many others, of whom ten in all grew to man or womanhood- Frederick was born at Berlin on the 24th of January 1712. grandfather, alarmed by medical forebodings that the Crown Princess, would " never produce a Prince or even a Princess that would live," had determined himself if possible to preserve hi, line from extinction, by marrying again. We quote the an. happy issue of the experiment. He chose the Princess Sophie Louisa of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who bore him no children, but persecuted him with intolerant Lutheranism, and finally herself went mad. This is a passage out of their married Iffe_the last, for it killed, the old. Eng.

"He sat one morning, in the chill February days of the Year 1713, in Apartment, as usual.; weak of nerves, but thinking no special evil; when. suddenly with huge single, the glass-door of his room went to sherds ; there rushed-in—bleeding and dishevelled, the fatal White Lady,' (rve4„ Frau), who is understood to walk that Schloss at Berlin, and announce Death to the Royal inhabitants. Majesty had fainted, or was fainting. Weisse Frau ? Oh no, your Majesty !'—Not that ; but indeed something almost worse.—Mad Queen in her Apartments, had been seized that dais when half or quarter dressed, with unusual orthodoxy or unusual jealousj, Watching her opportunity, she had whisked into the corridor, in es; treme deshabille ; and gone, like the wild roe, towards Majesty's Suite of Rooms ; through Majesty's glass-door like a catapult; and emerged, as we saw,—in petticoat and shift, with hair streaming, eyes glittering, arms cut, and the other sad trimmings. 0 Heaven, who could laugh ? There are tears due to Kings and to all men. It was deep misery; deep enough! Sis and misery' as Calvin well says, on the one side and the other ! The peer old King was carried to bed ; and never rose again, but died in a few days. The date of the Weine Frau's death, one might have hoped, was not distant either ; but she lasted, in her sad state, for above twenty years coming. "Old King Friedrich's death-day was 25th February 1713; the uncoil.. scious little Grandson being then in his Fourteenth month. To whom, after this long voyage round the world, we now gladly return." (Vol. I pp. 3764.) "The history of a man's childhood," says Mr. Carlyle in his Life of Sterling, "is the description of his parents and environ- ment : this is his inarticulate but highly important history, in those first times, while of articulate he has yet none." The pro- vince of true biography is to show us a man gradually becoming what we recognize him afterwards to have been. -Unless it do this, though it may gratify curiosity, and sate the thirst for fads, it will oonvey no real instruction and will fail even of its source of deepest interest. Unfortunately few students have the power to unravel the finished web of human character, and lay apart for our scrutiny the separate filaments which form it. Still fewer, having done this, can reverse the process, and recombine them once more, and let us see "how the shuttles fly, and the life-threads always 'in this loud-roaring loom of time.'" Mr. Carlyle has done both with wonderful skill and. success. The early home of Friedrich, and the influence silently working upon him before the years of consciousness and self-direction came are brought before us with singular vividness. Friedrich Wilhelm, indeed, is the most conspicuous personage in these two volumes. He, rather than his son, is the hero of them. This is Mr. Carlyle's estimate of him, which stands in striking contrast to the impossible notion which Macaulay's well-known essay has made the prevalent one in England : "Strange as it sounds in the Republic of Letters, we are tempted to call him a man of genius ; genius fated and promoted to work in National Hus- bandry, not in writing Verses or three-volume novels. A silent genius. His melodious stanza, which he cannot bear to see halt in any syllable, is a rough fact reduced to order ; fact made to stand firm on its feet with the world-rocks under it, and looking free towards all the winds and all the stars. He goes about suppressing platitudes, ripping-off futilities, turn- ing deceptions inside-out. The realm of Disorder, which is Unveracity, 'Unreality, what we call Chaos, has no fiercer enemy. Honest soul, and he seemed to himself such a stupid fellow often ; no tong,ne-learning, at all; little capable to give a reason for the faith that was in him. He cannot argue in articulate logic, only in inarticulate bellowings, or worse. * • * * A man of clear discernment, very good natural eye-sight; and irreparably confident in what his eyes told him, in what his belief was: yet of huge simplicity withal. Capable of being coaxed about, and led by the nose, to a strange degree, if there were an artist dexterous enough, daring enough! His own natural judgment was good, and though apt to become hasty and headlong, was always likely to come right in the end; but internally we may perceive his modesty, self-distrust, and other unexpected qualities, must have been great. And then his explosiveness, impatience, excita- bility; his conscious dumb ignorance of all things beyond his own small horizon of personal survey ! • * * * He was full of sensitiveness, rough as he was and shaggy of skin. His wild imaginations drove him hither and thither at a sad rate. He ought to have the privilege of genius. His tall Potsdam Regiment, his mad-looking passion for enlisting tall men: this also seems to me one of the whims of geniva,—an exaggerated notion to have his 'stanza' polished to the last punctilio of perfection ; and might be paralleled in the history of poets. Stranger man of genius,' or in more peculiar circumstances, the world never saw."

The outer man, which was the case of these inner qualities, Mr. Carlyle describes at great length, but not, as it appears to of with his usual effect. He presents an inventory of successive items, rather than combines them into a living picture. This, however, is the only instance, if it be one, in which his powers of moral-painting fall below the high standard by which he has taught us to try them. The passage is too long for extract,' tending over several pages,—or we would submit the matter to our reader's judgment.

The mother's influence is said, as a general rule, to be more marked in her children—at any rate more frequently impsrte4 w them by hereditary transmission, than that of the father. W nether this is true, we cannot venture to pronounce. No doubt, the fact that her influence comes first, and is exercised on the young maid Pai,nilsee.g,es; a

for onethin& she had given much of her physiognomy to the

dri h now born. his Portraits as Prince-Royal, he strongly re- m' -meb-lee her ; it is his mother's face informed with youth and new fire and translated into the masculine gender; in his later Portraits one less and less recognises the mother." (Vol. I. p. 39.) The impression of her in her maturer years, which Mr. Carlyle has brought away from the Prussian Galleries is thus given— A. serious' comely, rather plump, maternal-looking lady ; something thoughtful in those grey still eyes of hers, in the turn of her face and ear- ring of her head, as she sits there,. considerately gazing out upon a world '1„,eh mild never conform to her will. Decidedly a handsome, wholesome, and affectionateowtionate expression of face. Hanoverian in type, that is to say, blond, amid, slightly profuse ,--yet the better kind of Hanoverian, little or iTiothiag of the worse or at least of the worst kind. The eyes, as I say, are grey, and quiet, almost sad; expressive of reticence and reflection, of slow Constaney rather than of speed in any kind. One expects, could the picture peak, the querulous sound of maternal and other solicitude ; of a temper ieding towards the obstinate, the quietly unchangeable ;—loyal patience not wanting, yet in still larger measure royal impatience well concealed and long and carefully cherished. This is what I read in Sophie Dorothee's Portraits,—probably remembering what I had otherwise read, and come to bow of her." (Vol. I. p. 39.)

The domestic relations of the royal couple at the time of Frie- drich's birth, and afterwards are thus described-

<, Friedrich Wilhelm, now in his sixth year of wedlock, is still very fond of his Sophie Dorothee,-4 (Phedein, diminutive of Sophie), as he calls her; she also having, and continuing to have, the due wife's regard for her solid, honest, if somewhat explosive bear. He troubles her a little now and then, it is said, with whiffs of jealousy ; but they are whiffs only, the product of accidental moodinesses on him, or of transient aspects, misinter- preted, in the court-life of a youne.' and pretty woman. As the general rule, he is beautifully good-humoured, kind even, for a bear ; and, on the whole, they have begun their partnership under good omens. And indeed we may say, in spite of sad tempests that arose, they continued it under such. She brought him gradually no fewer than fourteen children of whom ten sareiTed 'him, and came to maturity : and it is to be admitted conjugal relation, though a royal, was always a human one; the main elements of it strictly observed on both sides ; all quarrels in it capable of being healed again, and the feeling on both sides true, however troublous. A rare fact among royal wedlocks, and perhaps a unique one in that epoch." (Vol. L IV. 3944),)

The respective characters and mutual relations of his parents were the influences most potent and lasting in "Friedrich's schooling,"—as they are in that of every one of us, and deserve to be specially singled. out for observation. His biographer fur- ther detects a French influence, derived from the Protestant re- fugees, male and female, who, on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had found a refuge in the court of Berlin, and a German one, due to the old soldiers and officials, who were his father's favourite counsellors and companions. "Bayle-Calvin logics, and shadows of Versailles, on this hand, and gun- powder Leopolds and inarticulate Hyperboreans on that : here is a wide di- versity of nutriment, all rather tough in quality, provided for the young soul." (Vol. i. p. 390.) Friedrich's direct teaching was conducted according to instruc- tions drawn up by his father, of a very rigid and disciplinarian character, arranging all his movements from rising to bed-time with mechanical precision and inflexibility. His studies had all more or less a bearing on his future career, as soldier and states- man, including, and being confined to, mathematics, history, geo- graphy, the law of nations, and the military societies, with the French and German languages. Boyish irregularities, however, and unpunctnality, a boyish want of scrupulous cleanliness, (which virtue, in Friedrich. Wilhelm's mind, held its Biblical position next to godliness,) a taste for the flute and for poetry, as well for certain fopperies in the hair-dressing and tailor line, offended the Spartan simplicity of the father.

"Fritz is a Querpfeifer Ha Poet, not a Soldier ! would his indignant Fa- ther growl; looking at those foreign effeminate ways of his. * * * * Fritz is celebrated, too, for his fine foot ; a dapper little fellow altogether, pretty in the eyes of simple female courtiers with his blond locks combed-out at the temples, with his bright eyes, shaip wit, and sparkling capricious ways. The cockatoo-keks, these, at least, we will abate, decides the Paternal mind.

"And so unexpectedly, Friedrich Wilhelm has commanded these bright locks, as contrary to military fashion, of which Fritz has now unworthily the honour of being a specimen [he was major in the Potsdam Guards] to be ruthlessly shorn away. Inexorable : the Hof-Chirurgus (Court Surgeon, of the nature of Barber-Surgeon), with scissors and comb, is here ; ruthless Father standing by. Crop him, my jolly Barber ; close down to the accurate standard ; soaped club instead of flowing locks ; we suffer no exceptions in this iailitarY department : I stand here till it is done. Poor Fritz, they say, had tears in his eyes ; but what help in tears ? The judicious Chirur- gus, however, proved merciful. The judicious Chirurgus struck in as if nothing loth, snack, snack, and made a great show of clipping. Friedrich Wilhelm took a newspaper till the job were done' the judicious Barber, still .1,nalcia,_ a great show of work, combed back rather than cut-off these Apollo locks; did Fritz accurately into soaped club, to the cursory eye' but left mim liable of shaking out his ehevelure on occasion,—to the lasting grati- tude of Fritz."—(Vol. L p. 507.) _ This incident, which a generation ago would have been deemed beneath the "dignity of history," occurred when Friedrich was about fifteen. Later he gave juster cause of dissatisfaction, falling into vicious habits, and incurring worse tribulation. He was pub- licly and cruelly beaten ; no measure was kept in the insults put uPell him. History presents no instance in. which the maxim about not sparing the rod, to spoil the child, was more faithfully _a_cted upon. The complications of European politics had alienated Friedrich Wilhelm from England, whose friendship, and the pros- pect of a two-fold marriage alliance with which, the Queen, the Crown Prince, and. Wilhelmina still cherished. There were in- trigues in the Palace and in. the Council,—wheel within wheel. For years the king was fairly distraught, and his anger found in its most _plastic state, has much to do with the matter. Of So- phie Dorothee, Mr. Carlyle, after a comparison of contemporary

vent in stormy explosions and blows the greater part of which fell upon his son, and drove him at last to a hair-brained attempt at flight from Prussia. The attempt, as is well known, failed. He was tried by Court-Martial as a deserter and sentenced to death. The remonstrances of Friedrich Wilhelm's Councillors, however, and the interposition of Foreign Courts,—Sweden, Hol- land, England, even Austria,—induced the King to spare his son's life. After fifteen months' imprisonment at the fortress of Ciis- trin, he was again received into favour, unconditionally surren- dering to the paternal authority, which he never again ventured to brave. From 1732 to 1736 he lived at Ruppin, " a little town. in that northwest FehrbeLlin region," as Colonel of the Regiment Golz, which was stationed there.

" Four important years of young life, " says Mr. Carlyle, " of which we must endeavour to give, in some intelligible condition, what traces go hovering about in such records as there arc. • * * • Quiet Ruppin stands in a grassy, flat country, much of which is natural moor, and less of it reclaimed at that time than now. The environs, except that they are a bit of the earth and have a bit of sky over them, do not set up for loveliness. Natural woods abound in that region ; also peat-bogs not yet drained ; and fishy lakes and mores of dark complexion : plenteous cattle there are, pigs among them ;—thicksoled husbandmen inarticulately toiling and moiling. Some glass-furnaces, a royal establishment, are the only manufactures we hear of. Not a picturesque country ; but a quiet and innocent, where work is cut out, and one hopes to be well left alone after doing it. This Crown- Prince has been in far less desirable localities.

" He had a reasonable house, two houses made into one for him, in the place. He laid out for himself a garden in the outskirts, what they call a 4 temple ' in it,—some more or less ornamental garden-house,—from which I have read of his 'letting off rockets ' in a summer twilight. Rockets to amuse a small dinner-party, I should guess,—dinner of Officers, such as lie had weekly or twice a week. On stiller evenings we can fancy him there in solitude ; reading meditative, or musically fluting ;—looking out upon the silent death of Day ; how the summer gloaming steals over the moorlands, and over all lands ; shutting up the toil of mortals' their very flocks and herds collapsing into silence, and the big Skies and endless Times over- arching him and them. With thoughts perhaps sombre enough now and then, but profitable if he face them piously. "I perceive he read a great deal at Ituppin : what Books I knew not specially ; but judge them to be of more serious solid quality than formerly ; and that his reading is now generally a kind of studying as well. :N ot the express sciences or Technologies ; not these, in any sort,—except the military and that an express exception. These he never cared for, or re- garded as the noble knowledge for a King or man. History and Moral Speculation ; what mankind have done and been in this world, (so far as ' History ' will give one any glimpse of that), and what the wisest men, poetical and other, have thought about mankind and their world : this is what he evidently had the appetite for : appetite unsatiable, which lasted with him to the very end of his days. Fontenellc, Rollin, Voltaire, all the then French lights and gradually others that lay deeper in the firmament : what suppers of the Gods one way have at Ruppm, without expense of wine Such an opportunity for reading he never had before. "In his soldier business he is punctual, assiduous ; having an interest to shine that way. And is, in fact, approvable, as an officer and soldier, by the strictest judge then living. Reads on soldiering withal; studious to know the rationale of it, the ancient and modern methods of it, the essential from the unessential in it ; to understand it thoroughly,—which he got to do. * * * * Now and afterwards this Crown Prince must have been a great military reader. From Caesar's Commentaries, and earlier, to the Chevalier Folard and the Marquis Feuquiere ; from Epaminondas at Leuctra to Charles XII. at Pultawa, all manner of Military Histories we perceive are at his finger-ends ; and he has penetrated into the essential heart of each, and learned what it had to teach him. Something of this, how much we know not, began at Ruppin, and it did not end again." (Vol. II. pp. 401- 4.) In June 1733, he married the Princess Elizabeth Christina of Brunswick-Bevern, feigning more reluctance than he really felt, that his obedience to the paternal commands might appear the more exemplary. In 1734, he served, creditably, in the Rhine campaign. In 1735, he was occupied in civil and military duties in Preussen. From 1736 to 1740, he resided at Reinsburg, in the territory of Ruppin' over. which Anzt or Government district he had been appointed to preside. This period Mr. Carlyle pro- nounces " Friedrich's happiest time." They were " Four years of Hope, Composure, realizable Idealism : an actual snatch of something like the Idyllic appointed him in a life-pilgrimage con- sisting otherwise of realisms oftenest contradictory enough, and sometimes of a very grim complexion."

To his literary studies he here added literary society, not very choice in quality, but the best he could get, and commenced his correspondence with Voltaire whom he endeavoured not very

successfully to interest in the Voltaire, philosophy. He

remained in Reinsburg till his father's death, for rather his abdi- cation on the very day of his death, (May 31, 1740,) called him to the throne. Friedrich as king stands over for future vo- lumes. What we have already is but introductory to the de- lineation vindicatory: of the man whom Mr. Carlyle regards as, with many shortcomings, the single heroic character of the eight- eenth century.

The greatest difficulty in noticing these two volumes arises from their exceeding richness. The fields of narrative and re- flection which we, following the line of Friedrich's education, have had to leave on the right hand and the left, our readers must explore for themselves. Mr. Carlyle enters minutely not only into the public events of the period—Treaties of Hanover an Vienna, of Wiislerhansen, and Seville, Pragm.atic Sanction, royal and national alliances and misunderstandings,—but shows us- also the springs and sources of them in. private and personal character and aims. Vivid descriptions of notable men and scenes are to be found without stint. Incidentally, much light is thrown upon many dark places of recent history. If we had any com- plaint to make, it would be that the central idea and purpose of the work is occasionlly somewhat obscured by excess of detail. To use an expression Mr. Carlyle is fond of, we "cannot see the wood for the trees." Of the style of the work the extracts we have given are suffi- cient specimens, and supersede criticism. Qualls vir, tails oratio (as the man such is his speech) was an adage of Erasmus's. Those who are anxious to hear what Mr. Carlyle has to say must not quarrel with his manner of saying it. He gives us events and thought not barely in themselves, but with the accompanying feelings they have excited in his mind,—steeped in the humours of the affections, animated intensely by "the scorn of scorn, the hate of hate, the love of love." History is quite as much a discipline of the affections and sympathies as food for the memory and un- derstanding; and it is Mr. Carlyle's unrivalled power over the former, which, more than all his other great gifts, constitutes him the first historical writer of his time. His language has not the easy and quiet flow of continuous thought, but the changing hues and attitudes of passion.

His own researches have led him to the conclusion that a genuine life of Friedrich cannot yet, "at this time, especially in this country," be written. He regards his volumes as merely a contribution and step to something better, which the future may hold in store for us. But whatever new discoveries may be made, rendering present views and narratives obsolete, will scarcely affect the fortunes of Mr. Carlyle's biography. It will always be ranked among the immortal works of history which genius has made an eternal possession to mankind. As in the case of Gibbon, particular statements and many views may require correction or modification, but the work as a whole is likely to remain.