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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume
+V. (of XXI.), by Thomas Carlyle
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.)
+       Frederick The Great--Double-Marriage Project, And What
+       Element It Fell Into--1723-1726
+
+Author: Thomas Carlyle
+
+Posting Date: June 13, 2008 [EBook #2105]
+Release Date: March 2000
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II. ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by D.R. Thompson
+
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II OF PRUSSIA
+
+FREDERICK THE GREAT
+
+By Thomas Carlyle
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V.--DOUBLE-MARRIAGE PROJECT, AND WHAT ELEMENT IT FELL INTO.--1723-1726.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I. -- DOUBLE-MARRIAGE IS DECIDED ON.
+
+We saw George I. at Berlin in October, 1723, looking out upon his
+little Grandson drilling the Cadets there; but we did not mention what
+important errand had brought his Majesty thither.
+
+Visits between Hanover and Berlin had been frequent for a long time
+back; the young Queen of Prussia, sometimes with her husband, sometimes
+without, running often over to see her Father; who, even after his
+accession to the English crown, was generally for some months every year
+to be met with in those favorite regions of his. He himself did not much
+visit, being of taciturn splenetic nature: but this once he had agreed
+to return a visit they had lately made him,--where a certain weighty
+Business had been agreed upon, withal; which his Britannic Majesty
+was to consummate formally, by treaty, when the meeting in Berlin took
+effect. His Britannic Majesty, accordingly, is come; the business in
+hand is no other than that thrice-famous "Double-Marriage" of Prussia
+with England; which once had such a sound in the ear of Rumor, and still
+bulks so big in the archives of the Eighteenth Century; which worked
+such woe to all parties concerned in it; and is, in fact, a first-rate
+nuisance in the History of that poor Century, as written hitherto.
+Nuisance demanding urgently to be abated;--were that well possible at
+present. Which, alas, it is not, to any great degree; there being an
+important young Friedrich inextricably wrapt up in it, to whom it was of
+such vital or almost fatal importance! Without a Friedrich, the affair
+could be reduced to something like its real size, and recorded in a
+few pages; or might even, with advantage, be forgotten altogether, and
+become zero. More gigantic instance of much ado about nothing has seldom
+occurred in human annals;--had not there been a Friedrich in the heart
+of it.
+
+Crown-Prince Friedrich is still very young for marriage-speculations on
+his score: but Mamma has thought good to take matters in time. And so
+we shall, in the next ensuing parts of this poor History, have to hear
+almost as much about Marriage as in the foolishest Three-volume Novel,
+and almost to still less purpose. For indeed, in that particular,
+Friedrich's young Life may be called a ROMANCE FLUNG HELLS-OVER-HEAD;
+Marriage being the one event there, round which all events turn,--but
+turn in the inverse or reverse way (as if the Devil were in them); not
+only towards no happy goal for him or Mamma, or us, but at last towards
+hardly any goal at all for anybody! So mad did the affair grow;--and is
+so madly recorded in those inextricable, dateless, chaotic Books. We
+have now come to regions of Narrative, which seem to consist of murky
+Nothingness put on boil; not land, or water, or air, or fire, but a
+tumultuously whirling commixture of all the four;--of immense extent
+too. Which must be got crossed, in some human manner. Courage, patience,
+good reader!
+
+
+
+
+QUEEN SOPHIE DOROTHEE HAS TAKEN TIME BY THE FORELOCK.
+
+Already, for a dozen years, this matter has been treated of. Queen
+Sophie Dorothee, ever since the birth of her Wilhelmina, has had the
+notion of it; and, on her first visit afterwards to Hanover, proposed
+it to "Princess Caroline,"--Queen Caroline of England who was to be, and
+who in due course was;--an excellent accomplished Brandenburg-Anspach
+Lady, familiar from of old in the Prussian Court: "You, Caroline, Cousin
+dear, have a little Prince, Fritz, or let us call him FRED, since he is
+to be English; little Fred, who will one day, if all go right, be King
+of England. He is two years older than my little Wilhelmina: why should
+not they wed, and the two chief Protestant Houses, and Nations, thereby
+be united?" Princess Caroline was very willing; so was Electress Sophie,
+the Great-Grandmother of both the parties; so were the Georges, Father
+and Grandfather of Fred: little Fred himself was highly charmed, when
+told of it; even little Wilhelmina, with her dolls, looked pleasantly
+demure on the occasion. So it remained settled in fact, though not in
+form; and little Fred (a florid milk-faced foolish kind of Boy, I guess)
+made presents to his little Prussian Cousin, wrote bits of love-letters
+to her; and all along afterwards fancied himself, and at length ardently
+enough became, her little lover and intended,--always rather a little
+fellow:--to which sentiments Wilhelmina signifies that she responded
+with the due maidenly indifference, but not in an offensive manner.
+
+After our Prussian Fritz's birth, the matter took a still closer form:
+"You, dear Princess Caroline, you have now two little Princesses again,
+either of whom might suit my little Fritzchen; let us take Amelia, the
+second of them, who is nearest his age?" "Agreed!" answered Princess
+Caroline again. "Agreed!" answered all the parties interested: and so it
+was settled, that the Marriage of Prussia to England should be a Double
+one, Fred of Hanover and England to Wilhelmina, Fritz of Prussia to
+Amelia; and children and parents lived thenceforth in the constant
+understanding that such, in due course of years, was to be the case,
+though nothing yet was formally concluded by treaty upon it. [Pollnitz,
+_Memoiren,_ ii. 193.]
+
+Queen Sophie Dorothee of Prussia was always eager enough for treaty, and
+conclusion to her scheme. True to it, she, as needle to the pole in
+all weathers; sometimes in the wildest weather, poor lady. Nor did the
+Hanover Serene Highnesses, at any time, draw back or falter: but
+having very soon got wafted across to England, into new more complex
+conditions, and wider anxieties in that new country, they were not so
+impressively eager as Queen Sophie, on this interesting point. Electress
+Sophie, judicious Great-Grandmother, was not now there: Electress Sophie
+had died about a month before Queen Anne; and never saw the English
+Canaan, much as she had longed for it. George I., her son, a taciturn,
+rather splenetic elderly Gentleman, very foreign in England, and
+oftenest rather sulky there and elsewhere, was not in a humor to be
+forward in that particular business.
+
+George I. had got into quarrel with his Prince of Wales, Fred's
+Father,--him who is one day to be George II., always a rather foolish
+little Prince, though his Wife Caroline was Wisdom's self in a
+manner:--George I. had other much more urgent cares than that of
+marrying his disobedient foolish little Prince of Wales's offspring; and
+he always pleaded difficulties, Acts of Parliament that would be needed,
+and the like, whenever Sophie Dorothee came to visit him at Hanover, and
+urge this matter. The taciturn, inarticulately thoughtful, rather sulky
+old Gentleman, he had weighty burdens lying on him; felt fretted and
+galled, in many ways; and had found life, Electoral and even Royal,
+a deceptive sumptuosity, little better than a more or less extensive
+"feast of SHELLS," next to no real meat or drink left in it to the
+hungry heart of man. Wife sitting half-frantic in the Castle of Ahlden,
+waxing more and more into a gray-haired Megaera (with whom Sophie
+Dorothee under seven seals of secrecy corresponds a little, and even
+the Prince of Wales is suspected of wishing to correspond); a foolish
+disobedient Prince of Wales; Jacobite Pretender people with their Mar
+Rebellions, with their Alberoni combinations; an English Parliament
+jangling and debating unmelodiously, whose very language is a mystery to
+us, nothing but Walpole in dog-latin to help us through it: truly it is
+not a Heaven-on-Earth altogether, much as Mother Sophie and her foolish
+favorite, our disobedient Prince of Wales, might long for it! And the
+Hanover Tail, the Robethons, Bernstorfs, Fabrices, even the Blackamoor
+Porters,--they are not beautiful either, to a taciturn Majesty of some
+sense, if he cared about their doings or them. Voracious, plunderous,
+all of them; like hounds, long hungry, got into a rich house which has
+no master, or a mere imaginary one. "MENTERIS IMPUDENTISSIME," said
+Walpole in his dog-latin once, in our Royal presence, to one of these
+official plunderous gentlemen, "You tell an impudent lie!"--at which we
+only laughed. [Horace Walpole, _Reminiscences of George I. and George
+II._ (London, 1786.)]
+
+His Britannic Majesty by no means wanted sense, had not his situation
+been incurably absurd. In his young time he had served creditably enough
+against the Turks; twice commanded the REICHS-Army in the Marlborough
+Wars, and did at least testify his indignation at the inefficient state
+of it. His Foreign Politics, so called, were not madder than those of
+others. Bremen and Verden he had bought a bargain; and it was natural to
+protect them by such resources as he had, English or other. Then there
+was the World-Spectre of the Pretender, stretching huge over Creation,
+like the Brocken-Spectre in hazy weather;--against whom how protect
+yourself, except by cannonading for the Kaiser at Messina; by rushing
+into every brabble that rose, and hiring the parties with money to fight
+it out well? It was the established method in that matter; method not
+of George's inventing, nor did it cease with George. As to Domestic
+Politics, except it were to keep quiet, and eat what the gods had
+provided, one does not find that he had any.--The sage Leibnitz would
+very fain have followed him to England; but, for reasons indifferently
+good, could never be allowed. If the truth must be told, the sage
+Leibnitz had a wisdom which now looks dreadfully like that of a
+wiseacre! In Mathematics even,--he did invent the Differential Calculus,
+but it is certain also he never could believe in Newton's System of the
+Universe, nor would read the PRINCIPIA at all. For the rest, he was
+in quarrel about Newton with the Royal Society here; ill seen, it is
+probable, by this sage and the other. To the Hanover Official Gentlemen
+devouring their English dead-horse, it did not appear that his presence
+could be useful in these parts. [Guhrauer, _Gottfried Freiherr von
+Leibnitz, eine Biographie_ (Breslau, 1842); Ker of Kersland, _Memoirs
+of Secret Transactions_ (London, 1727)].
+
+Nor are the Hanover womankind his Majesty has about him, quasi-wives or
+not, of a soul-entrancing character; far indeed from that. Two in chief
+there are, a fat and a lean: the lean, called "Maypole" by the English
+populace, is "Duchess of Kendal," with excellent pension, in the
+English Peeragy; Schulenburg the former German name of her; decidedly
+a quasi-wife (influential, against her will, in that sad Konigsmark
+Tragedy, at Hanover long since), who is fallen thin and old.
+"Maypole,"--or bare Hop-pole, with the leaves all stript; lean, long,
+hard;--though she once had her summer verdures too; and still, as an
+old quasi-wife, or were it only as an old article of furniture, has her
+worth to the royal mind, Schulenburgs, kindred of hers, are high in the
+military line; some of whom we may meet.
+
+Then besides this lean one, there is a fat; of whom Walpole (Horace, who
+had seen her in boyhood) gives description. Big staring black eyes, with
+rim of circular eyebrow, like a coach-wheel round its nave, very
+black the eyebrows also; vast red face; cheeks running into neck, neck
+blending indistinguishably with stomach,--a mere cataract of fluid
+tallow, skinned over and curiously dizened, according to Walpole's
+portraiture. This charming creature, Kielmannsegge by German name, was
+called "Countess of Darlington" in this country--with excellent pension,
+as was natural. They all had pensions: even Queen Sophie Dorothee, I
+have noticed in our State-Paper Office, has her small pension, "800
+pounds a year on the Irish Establishment:" Irish Establishment will
+never miss such a pittance for our poor Child, and it may be useful
+over yonder!--This Kielmannsegge, Countess of Darlington was, and is,
+believed by the gossiping English to have been a second simultaneous
+Mistress of his Majesty's; but seems, after all, to have been his
+Half-Sister and nothing more. Half-Sister (due to Gentleman Ernst and
+a Countess Platen of bad Hanover fame); grown dreadfully fat; but not
+without shrewdness, perhaps affection; and worth something in this dull
+foreign country, mere cataract of animal oils as she has become. These
+Two are the amount of his Britannic Majesty's resources in that matter;
+resources surely not extensive, after all!--
+
+His Britannic Majesty's day, in St. James's, is not of an interesting
+sort to him; and every evening he comes precisely at a certain hour to
+drink beer, seasoned with a little tobacco, and the company of these two
+women. Drinks diligently in a sipping way, says Horace; and smokes,
+with such dull speech as there may be,--not till he is drunk, but only
+perceptibly drunkish; raised into a kind of cloudy narcotic Olympus,
+and opaquely superior to the ills of life; in which state he walks
+uncomplainingly to bed. Government, when it can by any art be avoided,
+he rarely meddles with; shows a rugged sagacity, where he does and must
+meddle: consigns it to Walpole in dog-latin,--laughs at his "MENTIRIS."
+This is the First George; first triumph of the Constitutional Principle,
+which has since gone to such sublime heights among us,--heights which we
+at last begin to suspect might be depths, leading down, all men now ask:
+Whitherwards? A much-admired invention in its time, that of letting
+go the rudder, or setting a wooden figure expensively dressed to take
+charge of it, and discerning that the ship would sail of itself so much
+more easily! Which it will, if a peculiarly good seaboat, in certain
+kinds of sea,--for a time. Till the Sinbad "Magnetic Mountains" begin to
+be felt pulling, or the circles of Charybdis get you in their sweep; and
+then what an invention it was!--This, we say, is the new Sovereign Man,
+whom the English People, being in some perplexity about the Pope and
+other points, have called in from Hanover, to walk before them in the
+ways of heroism, and by command and by example guide Heavenwards their
+affairs and them. And they hope that he will do it? Or perhaps that
+their affairs will go thither of their own accord? Always a singular
+People!--
+
+Poor George, careless of these ulterior issues, has always trouble
+enough with the mere daily details, Parliamentary insolences, Jacobite
+plottings, South-Sea Bubbles; and wishes to hunt, when he gets over to
+Hanover, rather than to make Marriage-Treaties. Besides, as Wilhelmina
+tells us, they have filled him with lies, these Hanover Women and
+their emissaries: "Your Princess Wilhelmina is a monster of ill-temper,
+crooked in the back and what not," say they. If there is to be a
+Marriage, double or single, these Improper Females must first be
+persuaded to consent. [_Memoires de Bareith._] Difficulties enough. And
+there is none to help; Friedrich Wilhelm cares little about the matter,
+though he has given his Yes,--Yes, since you will.
+
+But Sophie Dorothee is diligent and urgent, by all opportunities;--and,
+at length, in 1723, the conjuncture is propitious. Domestic Jacobitism,
+in the shape of Bishop Atterbury, has got, itself well banished;
+Alberoni and his big schemes, years ago they are blown into outer
+darkness; Charles XII. is well dead, and of our Bremen and Verden no
+question henceforth; even the Kaiser's Spectre-Hunt, or Spanish Duel,
+is at rest for the present, and the Congress of Cambrai is sitting, or
+trying all it can to sit: at home or abroad, there is nothing, not even
+Wood's Irish Halfpence, as yet making noise. And on the other hand, Czar
+Peter is rumored (not without foundation) to be coming westward, with
+some huge armament; which, whether "intended for Sweden" or not, renders
+a Prussian alliance doubly valuable.
+
+And so now at last, in this favorable aspect of the stars, King George,
+over at Herrenhausen, was by much management of his Daughter Sophie's,
+and after many hitches, brought to the mark. And Friedrich Wilhelm came
+over too; ostensibly to bring home his Queen, but in reality to hear
+his Father-in-law's compliance to the Double-Marriage,--for which his
+Prussian Majesty is willing enough, if others are willing. Praised be
+Heaven, King George has agreed to everything; consents, one propitious
+day (Autumn 1723, day not otherwise dated),--Czar Peter's Armament, and
+the questionable aspects in France, perhaps quickening his volitions
+a little. Upon which Friedrich Wilhelm and Queen Sophie have returned
+home, content in that matter; and expect shortly his Britannic Majesty's
+counter-visit, to perfect the details, and make a Treaty of it.
+
+His Britannic Majesty, we say, has in substance agreed to everything.
+And now, in the silence of Nature, the brown leaves of October still
+hanging to the trees in a picturesque manner, and Wood's Halfpence
+not yet begun to jingle in the Drapier's Letters of Dean Swift,--his
+Britannic Majesty is expected at Berlin. At Berlin; properly at
+Charlottenburg a pleasant rural or suburban Palace (built by his
+Britannic Majesty's late noble Sister, Sophie Charlotte, "the Republican
+Queen," and named after her, as was once mentioned), a mile or two
+Southwest of that City. There they await King George's counter-visit.
+
+Poor Wilhelmina is in much trepidation about it; and imparts her poor
+little feelings, her anticipations and experiences, in readable terms:--
+
+"There came, in those weeks, one of the Duke of Gloucester's gentlemen
+to Berlin,"--DUKE OF GLOUCESTER is Fred our intended, not yet Prince of
+Wales, and if the reader should ever hear of a DUKE OF EDINBURGH,
+that too is Fred,--"Duke of Gloucester's gentlemen to Berlin," says
+Wilhelmina: "the Queen had Soiree (APPARTEMENT); he was presented to her
+as well as to me. He made me a very obliging compliment on his Master's
+part; I blushed, and answered only by a courtesy. The Queen, who had her
+eye on me, was very angry I had answered the Duke's compliments in mere
+silence; and rated me sharply (ME LAVA LA TETE D'IMPORTANCE) for it;
+and ordered me, under pain of her indignation, to repair that fault
+to-morrow. I retired, all in tears, to my room; exasperated against the
+Queen and against the Duke; I swore I would never marry him, would throw
+myself at the feet--" And so on, as young ladies of vivacious temper,
+in extreme circumstances, are wont:--did speak, however, next day, to
+my Hanover gentleman about his Duke, a little, though in an embarrassed
+manner. Alas, I am yet but fourteen, gone the 3d of July last: tremulous
+as aspen-leaves; or say, as sheet-lightning bottled in one of the
+thinnest human skins; and have no experience of foolish Dukes and
+affairs!--
+
+"Meanwhile," continues Wilhelmina, "the King of England's time of
+arrival was drawing nigh. We repaired, on the 6th of October, to
+Charlottenburg to receive him. The heart of me kept beating, and I
+was in cruel agitations. King George [my Grandfather, and Grand Uncle]
+arrived on the 8th, about seven in the evening;"--dusky shades already
+sinking over Nature everywhere, and all paths growing dim. Abundant
+flunkies, of course, rush out with torches or what is needful. "The King
+of Prussia, the Queen and all their Suite received him in the Court of
+the Palace, the 'Apartments' being on the ground-floor. So soon as he
+had saluted the King and Queen, I was presented to him. He embraced me;
+and turning to the Queen said to her, 'Your daughter is very big of
+her age!' He gave the Queen his hand, and led her into her apartment,
+whither everybody followed them. As soon as I came in, he took a light
+from the table, and surveyed me from head to foot. I stood motionless as
+a statue, and was much put out of countenance. All this went on without
+his uttering the least word. Having thus passed me in review, he
+addressed himself to my Brother, whom he caressed much, and amused
+himself with, for a good while." Pretty little Grandson this, your
+Majesty;--any future of history in this one, think you? "I," says
+Wilhelmina, "took the opportunity of slipping out;"--hopeful to get
+away; but could not, the Queen having noticed.
+
+"The Queen made me a sign to follow her; and passed into a neighboring
+apartment, where she had the English and Germans of King George's Suite
+successively presented to her. After some talk with these gentlemen, she
+withdrew; leaving me to entertain them, and saying: 'Speak English to
+my Daughter; you will find she speaks it very well.' I felt much less
+embarrassed, once the Queen was gone; and picking up a little courage, I
+entered into conversation with these English. As I spoke their language
+like my mother-tongue, I got pretty well out of the affair, and
+everybody seemed charmed with me. They made my eulogy to the Queen; told
+her I had quite the English air, and was made to be their Sovereign one
+day. It was saying a great deal on their part: for these English think
+themselves so much above all other people, that they imagine they are
+paying a high compliment when they tell any one he has got English
+manners.
+
+"Their King [my Grandpapa] had got Spanish manners, I should say: he was
+of an extreme gravity, and hardly spoke a word to anybody. He saluted
+Madam Sonsfeld [my invaluable thrice-dear Governess] very coldly;
+and asked her 'If I was always so serious, and if my humor was of the
+melancholy turn?' 'Anything but that, Sire,' answered the other:
+'but the respect she has for your Majesty prevents her from being as
+sprightly as she commonly is.' He wagged his head, and answered nothing.
+The reception he had given me, and this question, of which I heard, gave
+me such a chill, that I never had the courage to speak to him,"--was
+merely looked at with a candle by Grandpapa.
+
+"We were summoned to supper at last, where this grave Sovereign still
+remained dumb. Perhaps he was right, perhaps he was wrong; but I think
+he followed the proverb, which says, Better hold your tongue than speak
+badly. At the end of the repast he felt indisposed. The Queen would have
+persuaded him to quit table; they bandied compliments a good while on
+the point; but at last she threw down her napkin, and rose. The King of
+England naturally rose too; but began to stagger; the King of Prussia
+ran up to help him, all the company ran bustling about him; but it was
+to no purpose: he sank on his knees; his peruke falling on one side, and
+his hat [or at least his head, Madam!] on the other. They stretched
+him softly on the floor; where he remained a good hour without
+consciousness. The pains they took with him brought back his senses, by
+degrees, at last. The Queen and the King [of Prussia] were in despair
+all this while. Many have thought this attack was a herald of the stroke
+of apoplexy which came by and by,"--within four years from this date,
+and carried off his Majesty in a very gloomy manner.
+
+"They passionately entreated him to retire now," continues Wilhelmina;
+"but he would not by any means. He led out the Queen, and did the other
+ceremonies, according to rule; had a very bad night, as we learned
+underhand;" but persisted stoically nevertheless, being a crowned
+Majesty, and bound to it. He stoically underwent four or three other
+days, of festival, sight-seeing, "pleasure" so called;--among other
+sights, saw little Fritz drilling his Cadets at Berlin;--and on the
+fourth day (12th October, 1723, so thinks Wilhelmina) fairly "signed
+the Treaty of the Double-Marriage," English Townshend and the Prussian
+Ministry having settled all things. [Wilhelmina, _Memoires de Bareith,_
+i. 83, 87,--In Coxe (_Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole,_ London, 1798),
+ii. 266, 272, 273, are some faint hints, from Townshend, of this Berlin
+journey.]
+
+"Signed the Treaty," thinks Wilhelmina, "all things being settled."
+Which is an error on the part of Wilhelmina. Settled many or all
+things were by Townshend and the others: but before signing, there was
+Parliament to be apprised, there were formalities, expenditure of time;
+between the cup and the lip, such things to intervene;--and the sad fact
+is, the Double-Marriage Treaty never was signed at all!--However, all
+things being now settled ready for signing, his Britannic Majesty, next
+morning, set off for the GOHRDE again, to try if there were any hunting
+possible.
+
+This authentic glimpse, one of the few that are attainable, of their
+first Constitutional King, let English readers make the most of. The act
+done proved dreadfully momentous to our little Friend, his Grandson; and
+will much concern us!
+
+Thus, at any rate, was the Treaty of the Double-Marriage settled, to the
+point of signing,--thought to be as good as signed. It was at the
+time when Czar Peter was making armaments to burn Sweden; when
+Wood's Halfpence (on behalf of her Improper Grace of Kendal, the lean
+Quasi-Wife, "Maypole" or Hop-pole, who had run short of money, as she
+often did) were about beginning to jingle in Ireland; [Coxe (i. 216,
+217, and SUPPLY the dates); Walpole to Townshend, 13th October, 1723
+(ib. ii. 275): _"The Drapier's Letters"_ are of 1724.] when Law's Bubble
+"System" had fallen, well flaccid, into Chaos again; when Dubois the
+unutterable Cardinal had at length died, and d'Orleans the unutterable
+Regent was unexpectedly about to do so,--in a most surprising
+Sodom-and-Gomorrah manner. [2d December, 1723: Barbier, _Journal
+Historique du Regne de Louis XV. _ (Paris, 1847), i. 192, 196;
+Lacretelle, _Histoire de France, 18me siecle;_ &c.] Not to mention other
+dull and vile phenomena of putrid fermentation, which were transpiring,
+or sluttishly bubbling up, in poor benighted rotten Europe here or
+there;--since these are sufficient to date the Transaction for us; and
+what does not stick to our Fritz and his affairs it is more pleasant to
+us to forget than to remember, of such an epoch.
+
+Hereby, for the present, is a great load rolled from Queen Sophie
+Dorothee's heart. One, and, that the highest, of her abstruse
+negotiations, cherished, labored in, these fourteen years, she has
+brought to a victorious issue,--has she not? Her poor Mother, once so
+radiant, now so dim and angry, shut in the Castle of Ahlden, does not
+approve this Double-Marriage; not she for her part;--as indeed evil to
+all Hanoverian interests is now chiefly her good, poor Lady; and she is
+growing more and more of a Megaera every day. With whom Sophie Dorothee
+has her own difficulties and abstruse practices; but struggles always
+to maintain, under seven-fold secrecy, some thread of correspondence and
+pious filial ministration wherever possible; that the poor exasperated
+Mother, wretchedest and angriest of women, be not quite cut off from the
+kinship of the living, but that some soft breath of pity may cool her
+burning heart now and then. [In _Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea_ (London,
+1845), ii. 385, 393, are certain fractions of this Correspondence,
+"edited" in an amazing manner.] A dark tragedy of Sophie's, this; the
+Bluebeard Chamber of her mind, into which no eye but her own must ever
+look.
+
+
+
+
+PRINCESS AMELIA COMES INTO THE WORLD.
+
+In reference to Queen Sophie, and chronologically if not otherwise
+connected with this Double-Marriage Treaty, I will mention one
+other thing. Her Majesty had been in fluctuating health, all summer;
+unaccountable symptoms turning up in her Majesty's constitution,
+languors, qualms, especially a tendency to swelling or increase of size,
+which had puzzled and alarmed her Doctors and her. Friedrich Wilhelm,
+on conclusion of the Marriage-Treaty, had been appointed to join his
+Father-in-law, Britannic George, at the Gohrde, in some three weeks'
+time, and have a bout of hunting. On the 8th of November, bedtime
+being come, he kissed his Wilhelmina and the rest, by way of good-by;
+intending to start very early on the morrow:--long journey (150 miles or
+so), to be done all in one day. In the dead of the night, Queen
+Sophie was seized with dreadful colics,--pangs of colic or who knows
+what;--Friedrich Wilhelm is summoned; rises in the highest alarm; none
+but the maids and he at hand to help; and the colic, or whatever it may
+be, gets more and more dreadful.
+
+Colic? O poor Sophie, it is travail, and no colic; and a clever young
+Princess is suddenly the result! None but Friedrich Wilhelm and the maid
+for midwives; mother and infant, nevertheless, doing perfectly well.
+Friedrich Wilhelm did not go on the morrow, but next day; laughed, ever
+and anon in loud hahas, at the part he had been playing; and was very
+glad and merry. How the experienced Sophie, whose twelfth child this
+is, came to commit such an oversight is unaccountable; but the fact is
+certain, and made a merry noise in Court circles. [Pollnitz, ii. 199;
+Wilhelmina, i. 87, 88.]
+
+The clever little Princess, now born in this manner, is known by name
+to idle readers. She was christened AMELIA; and we shall hear of her in
+time coming. But there was, as the Circulating Libraries still intimate,
+a certain loud-spoken braggart of the histrionic-heroic sort, called
+Baron Trenck, windy, rash, and not without mendacity, who has endeavored
+to associate her with his own transcendent and not undeserved ill-luck;
+hinting the poor Princess into a sad fame in that way. For which,
+it would now appear, there was no basis whatever! Most condemnable
+Trenck;--whom, however, Robespierre guillotined finally, and so settled
+that account and others.
+
+Of Sophie Dorothee's twelve children, including this Amelia, there are
+now eight living, two boys, six girls; and after Amelia, two others,
+boys, are successively to come: ten in all, who grew to be men and
+women. Of whom perhaps I had better subjoin a List; now that the eldest
+Boy and Girl are about to get settled in life; and therewith close this
+Chapter.
+
+
+
+
+FRIEDRICH WILHELM'S TEN CHILDREN.
+
+Marriage to Sophie Dorothee, 28th November, 1706.
+
+A little Prince, born 23d November, 1707, died in six months. Then came,
+
+1. FREDERIKA SOPHIE WILHELMINA, ultimately Margravine of Baireuth, after
+strange adventures in the marriage-treaty way. Wrote her _Memoires_
+there, about 1744. Of whom we shall hear much. Left a Daughter, her one
+child; Daughter badly married, to "Karl reigning Duke of Wurtemberg"
+(Poet Schiller's famous Serene Highness there), from whom she had to
+separate, &c., with anger enough, by and by.
+
+After Wilhelmina in the Family series came a second Prince, who died in
+the eleventh month. Then, 24th January, 1712,
+
+2. FRIEDRICH.
+
+After whom (1713) a little Princess, who died in few months. And then,
+
+3. FREDERIKA LOUISA, born 28th September, 1714; age now about nine.
+Margravine of Anspach, 30th May, 1729; Widow 1757. Her one Son, born
+1736, was the LADY-CRAVEN'S Anspach. Frederika Louisa died 4th February,
+1734.
+
+4. PHILIPPINA CHARLOTTE, born 13th of March, 1716; became Duchess of
+Brunswick (her Husband was Eldest Brother of the "Prince Ferdinand"
+so famous in England in the Seven-Years War); her Son was the Duke who
+invaded France in 1792, and was tragically hurled to ruin in the Battle
+of Jena, 1806. The Mother lived till 1801; Widow since 1780.
+
+After whom, in 1717, again a little Prince, who died within two years
+(our Fritz then seven,--probably the first time Death ever came before
+him, practically into his little thoughts in this world): then,
+
+5. SOPHIE DOROTHEE MARIA, born 25th January, 1719; Margravine of
+Schwedt, 1734 (eldest Magraf of Schwedt, mentioned above as a comrade of
+the Crown-Prince). Her life not very happy; she died 1765. Left no son
+(Brother-in-law succeeded, last of the Schwedt MARGRAVES): her
+Daughter, wedded to Prince Friedrich Eugen, a Prussian Officer, Cadet
+of Wurtemberg and ultimately Heir there, is Ancestress of the Wurtemberg
+Sovereignties that now are, and also (by one of HER daughters married to
+Paul of Russia) of all the Czar kindred of our time. [Preuss, iv. 278;
+Erman, _Vie de Sophie Charlotte,_ p. 2722.]
+
+6. LOUISA ULRIQUE, born 24th July, 1720; married Adolf Friedrich,
+Heir-Apparent, subsequemly King of Sweden, 17th July, 1744; Queen (he
+having acceded) 6th April, 1751; Widow 1771; died, at Stockholm, 16th
+July, 1782. Mother of the subsequent Kings; her Grandson the DEPOSED>
+[OErtel, p. 83; Hubner, tt. 91, 227.]
+
+7. AUGUST WILHELM, born 9th August, 1722; Heir-Apparent after Friedrich
+(so declared by Friedrich, 30th June, 1744); Father of the Kings who
+have since followed. He himself died, in sad circumstances, as we shall
+see, 12th June, 1758.
+
+8. ANNA AMELIA, born 9th November, 1723,--on the terms we have seen.
+
+9. FRIEDRICH HEINRICH LUDWIG, born 18th January, 1726;--the famed Prince
+Henri, of whom we shall hear.
+
+10. AUGUST FERDINAND, born 23d May, 1730: a brilliant enough little
+soldier under his Brother, full of spirit and talent, but liable to weak
+health;--was Father of the "Prince Louis Ferdinand," a tragic Failure
+of something considerable, who went off in Liberalism, wit, in high
+sentiment, expenditure and debauchery, greatly to the admiration of some
+persons; and at length rushed desperate upon the Frenoh, and found his
+quietus (10th October, 1806), four days before the Battle of Jena.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II. -- A KAISER HUNTING SHADOWS.
+
+Treaty of Double-Marriage is ready for signing, once the needful
+Parliamentary preludings are gone through; Treaty is signed, thinks
+Wilhelmina,--forgetting the distance between cup and lip!--As to
+signing, or even to burning, and giving up the thought of signing, alas,
+how far are we yet from that! Imperial spectre-huntings and the politics
+of most European Cabinets will connect themselves with that; and send
+it wandering wide enough,--lost in such a jungle of intrigues,
+pettifoggings, treacheries, diplomacies domestic and foreign, as the
+course of true-love never got entangled in before.
+
+The whole of which extensive Cabinet operations, covering square miles
+of paper at this moment,--having nevertheless, after ten years of
+effort, ended in absolute zero,--were of no worth even to the managers
+of them; and are of less than none to any mortal now or henceforth. So
+that the method of treating them becomes a problem to History. To pitch
+them utterly out of window, and out of memory, never to be mentioned in
+human speech again: this is the manifest prompting of Nature;--and this,
+were not our poor Crown-Prince and one or two others involved in them,
+would be our ready and thrice-joyful course. Surely the so-called
+"Politics of Europe" in that day are a thing this Editor would otherwise
+with his whole soul, forget to all eternity! "Putrid fermentation,"
+ending, after the endurance of much mal-odor, in mere zero to you and
+to every one, even to the rotting bodies themselves:--is there any wise
+Editor that would connect himself with that? These are the fields of
+History which are to be, so soon as humanly possible, SUPPRESSED; which
+only Mephistopheles, or the bad Genius of Mankind, can contemplate with
+pleasure.
+
+Let us strive to touch lightly the chief summits, here and there, of
+that intricate, most empty, mournful Business,--which was really once
+a Fact in practical Europe, not the mere nightmare of an Attorney's
+Dream;--and indicate, so far as indispensable, how the young Friedrich,
+Friedrich's Sister, Father, Mother, were tribulated, almost heart-broken
+and done to death, by means of it.
+
+
+
+
+IMPERIAL MAJESTY ON THE TREATY OF UTRECHT.
+
+Kaiser Karl VI., head of the Holy Romish Empire at this time, was a
+handsome man to look upon; whose life, full of expense, vicissitude,
+futile labor and adventure, did not prove of much use to the world.
+Describable as a laborious futility rather. He was second son of that
+little Leopold, the solemn little Herr in red stockings, who had such
+troubles, frights, and runnings to and fro with the sieging Turks,
+liberative Sobieskis, acquisitive Louis Fourteenths; and who at length
+ended in a sea of futile labor, which they call the Spanish Succession
+War.
+
+This Karl, second son, had been appointed "King of Spain" in that futile
+business; and with much sublimity, though internally in an impoverished
+condition, he proceeded towards Spain, landing in England to get cash
+for the outfit;--arrived in Spain; and roved about there as Titular-King
+for some years, with the fighting Peterboroughs, Galways, Stahrembergs;
+but did no good there, neither he nor his Peterboroughs. At length, his
+Brother Joseph, Father Leopold's successor, having died, [17th April,
+1711.] Karl came home from Spain to be Kaiser. At which point, Karl
+would have been wise to give up his Titular Kingship in Spain; for he
+never got, nor will get, anything but futile labor from hanging to it.
+He did hang to it nevertheless; and still, at this date of George's
+visit and long afterwards, hangs,--with notable obstinacy. To the woe of
+men and nations: punishment doubtless of his sins and theirs!--
+
+Kaiser Karl shrieked mere amazement and indignation, when the English
+tired of fighting for him and it. When the English said to their great
+Marlborough: "Enough, you sorry Marlborough! You have beaten Louis XIV.
+to the suppleness of wash-leather, at our bidding; that is true, and
+that may have had its difficulties: but, after all, we prefer to have
+the thing precisely as it would have been without any fighting. You,
+therefore, what is the good of you? You are a--person whom we fling
+out like sweepings, now that our eyesight returns, and accuse of common
+stealing. Go and be--!"
+
+Nothing ever had so disgusted and astonished Kaiser Karl as this
+treatment,--not of Marlborough, whom he regarded only as he would
+have done a pair of military boots or a holster-pistol of superior
+excellence, for the uses that were in him,--but of the Kaiser Karl his
+own sublime self, the heart and focus of Political Nature; left in this
+manner, now when the sordid English and Dutch declined spending blood
+and money for him farther. "Ungrateful, sordid, inconceivable souls,"
+answered Karl, "was there ever, since the early Christian times, such
+a martyr as you have now made of me!" So answered Karl, in diplomatic
+groans and shrieks, to all ends of Europe. But the sulky English and
+Allies, thoroughly tired of paying and bleeding, did not heed him; made
+their Peace of Utrecht [Peace of Utrecht, 11th April, 1713; Peace of
+Rastadt (following upon the Preliminaries of Baden), 6th March, 1714.]
+with Louis XIV., who was now beaten supple; and Karl, after a year of
+indignant protests and futile attempts to fight Louis on his own score,
+was obliged to do the like. He has lost the Spanish crown; but still
+holds by the shadow of it; will not quit that, if he can help it. He
+hunts much, digests well; is a sublime Kaiser, though internally rather
+poor, carrying his head high; and seems to himself, on some sides of his
+life, a martyred much-enduring man.
+
+
+
+
+IMPERIAL MAJESTY HAS GOT HAPPILY WEDDED.
+
+Kaiser Karl, soon after the time of going to Spain had decided that a
+Wife would be necessary. He applied to Caroline of Anspach, now English
+Princess of Wales, but at that time an orphaned Brandenburg-Anspach
+Princess, very Beautiful, graceful, gifted, and altogether unprovided
+for; living at Berlin under the guardianship of Friedrich the first
+King. Her young Mother had married again,--high enough match (to
+Kur-Sachsen, elder Brother of August the Strong, August at that time
+without prospects of the Electorate);--but it lasted short while:
+Caroline's Mother and Saxon Stepfather were both now, long since, dead.
+So she lived at Berlin brilliant though unportioned;--with the rough cub
+Friedrich Wilhelm much following her about, and passionately loyal to
+her, as the Beast was to Beauty; whom she did not mind except as a
+cub loyal to her; being five years older than he. [Forster, i. 107.]
+Indigent bright Caroline, a young lady of fine aquiline features and
+spirit, was applied for to be Queen of Spain; wooer a handsome man,
+who might even be Kaiser by and by. Indigent bright Caroline at once
+answered, No. She was never very orthodox in Protestant theology; but
+could not think of taking up Papistry for lucre's and ambition's sake:
+be that always remembered on Caroline's behalf.
+
+The Spanish Majesty next applied at Brunswick Wolfenbuttel; no lack of
+Princesses there: Princesa Elizabeth, for instance; Protestant she too,
+but perhaps not so squeamish? Old Anton Ulrich, whom some readers know
+for the idle Books, long-winded Novels chiefly, which he wrote, was the
+Grandfather of this favored Princess; a good-natured old gentleman, of
+the idle ornamental species, in whose head most things, it is likely,
+were reduced to vocables, scribble and sentimentality; and only a steady
+internal gravitation towards praise and pudding was traceable as
+very real in him. Anton Ulrich, affronted more or less by the immense
+advancement of Gentleman Ernst and the Hanoverian or YOUNGER Brunswick
+Line, was extremely glad of the Imperial offer; and persuaded his timid
+Grand-daughter, ambitious too, but rather conscience-stricken, That the
+change from Protestant to Catholic, the essentials being so perfectly
+identical in both, was a mere trifle; that he himself, old as he was,
+would readily change along with her, so easy was it. Whereupon the
+young Lady made the big leap; abjured her religion; [1st May, 1707, at
+Bamberg.]--went to Spain as Queen (with sad injury to her complexion,
+but otherwise successfully more or less);--and sits now as Empress
+beside her Karl VI. in a grand enough, probably rather dull, but not
+singularly unhappy manner.
+
+She, a Brunswick Princess, with Nephews and Nieces who may concern us,
+is Kaiserinn to Kaiser Karl: for aught I know of her, a kindly simple
+Wife, and unexceptionable Sovereign Majesty, of the sort wanted; whom
+let us remember, if we meet her again one day. I add only of this poor
+Lady, distinguished to me by a Daughter she had, that her mind still had
+some misgivings about the big leap she had made in the Protestant-Papist
+way. Finding Anton Ulrich still continue Protestant, she wrote to him
+out of Spain:--"Why, O honored Grandpapa, have you not done as you
+promised? Ah, there must be a taint of mortal sin in it, after all!"
+Upon which the absurdly situated old Gentleman did change his
+religion; and is marked as a Convert in all manner of Genealogies and
+Histories;--truly an old literary gentleman ducal and serene, restored
+to the bosom of the Church in a somewhat peculiarly ridiculous manner.
+[Michaelis, i. 131.]--But to return.
+
+
+
+
+IMPERIAL MAJESTY AND THE TERMAGANT OF SPAIN.
+
+Ever after the Peace of Utrecht, when England and Holland declined to
+bleed for him farther, especially ever since his own Peace of Rastadt
+made with Louis the year after Kaiser Karl had utterly lost hold of
+the Crown of Spain; and had not the least chance to clutch that bright
+substance again. But he held by the shadow of it, with a deadly Hapsburg
+tenacity; refused for twenty years, under all pressures, to part with
+the shadow: "The Spanish Hapsburg Branch is dead; whereupon do not I,
+of the Austrian Branch, sole representative of Kaiser Karl the Fifth,
+claim, by the law of Heaven, whatever he possessed in Spain, by law of
+ditto? Battles of Blenheim of Malplaquet, Court-intrigues of Mrs. Masham
+and the Duchess: these may bring Treaties of Utrecht, and what you are
+pleased to call laws of Earth;--but a Hapsburg Kaiser knows higher laws,
+if you would do a thousand Utrechts; and by these, Spain is his!"
+
+Poor Kaiser Karl: he had a high thought in him really though a most
+misguided one. Titular King of Men; but much bewildered into mere
+indolent fatuity, inane solemnity, high sniffing pride grounded on
+nothing at all; a Kaiser much sunk in the sediments of his muddy
+Epoch. Sure enough, he was a proud lofty solemn Kaiser, infinitely
+the gentleman in air and humor; Spanish gravities, ceremonials,
+reticences;--and could, in a better scene, have distinguished himself by
+better than mere statuesque immovability of posture, dignified endurance
+of ennui, and Hapsburg tenacity in holding the grip. It was not till
+1735, after tusslings and wrenchings beyond calculation, that he would
+consent to quit the Shadow of the Crown of Spain; and let Europe BE at
+peace on that score.
+
+The essence of what is called the European History of this Period, such
+History as a Period sunk dead in spirit, and alive only in stomach, can
+have, turns all on Kaiser Karl, and these his clutchings at shadows.
+Which makes a very sad, surprising History indeed; more worthy to be
+called Phenomena of Putrid Fermentation, than Struggles of Human Heroism
+to vindicate itself in this Planet, which latter alone are worthy of
+recording as "History" by mankind.
+
+On the throne of Spain, beside Philip V. the melancholic new Bourbon,
+Louis XIV.'s Grandson, sat Elizabeth Farnese, a termagant tenacious
+woman, whose ambitious cupidities were not inferior in obstinacy to
+Kaiser Karl's, and proved not quite so shadowy as his. Elizabeth also
+wanted several things: renunciation of your (Kaiser Karl's) shadowy
+claims; nay of sundry real usurpations you and your Treaties have made
+on the actual possessions of Spain,--Kingdom of Sicily, for instance;
+Netherlands, for instance; Gibraltar, for instance. But there is one
+thing which, we observe, is indispensable throughout to Elizabeth
+Farnese: the future settlement of her dear Boy Carlos. Carlos, whom as
+Spanish Philip's second Wife she had given to Spain and the world, as
+Second or supplementary INFANT there,--a troublesome gift to Spain and
+others.
+
+"This dear Boy, surely he must have his Italian Apanages, which, you
+have provided for him: Duchies of Parma and Piacenza, which will fall
+heirless soon. Security for these Italian Apanages, such as will satisfy
+a Mother: Let us introduce Spanish garrisons into Parma and Piacenza
+at once! How else can we be certain of getting those indispensable
+Apanages, when they fall vacant?" On this point Elizabeth Farnese was
+positive, maternally vehement; would take no subterfuge, denial or
+delay: "Let me perceive that I shall have these Duchies: that, first of
+all; or else not that only, but numerous other things will be demanded
+of you!"
+
+Upon which point the Kaiser too, who loved his Duchies, and hoped yet
+to keep them by some turn of the game, never could decide to comply.
+Whereupon Elizabeth grew more and more termagant; listened to wild
+counsels; took up an Alberoni, a Ripperda, any wandering diplomatic
+bull-dog that offered; and let them loose upon the Kaiser and her
+other gainsayers. To the terror of mankind, lest universal war should
+supervene. She held the Kaiser well at bay, mankind well in panic; and
+continually there came on all Europe, for about twenty years, a terror
+that war was just about to break out, and the whole world to take fire.
+The History so called of Europe went canting from side to side; heeling
+at a huge rate, according to the passes and lunges these two giant
+figures, Imperial Majesty and the Termagant of Spain, made at one
+another,--for a twenty years or more, till once the duel was decided
+between them.
+
+There came next to no war, after all; sputterings of war twice
+over,--1718, Byng at Messina, as we saw; and then, in 1727, a second
+sputter, as we are to see:--but the neighbors always ran with buckets,
+and got it quenched. No war to speak of; but such negotiating,
+diplomatizing, universal hope, universal fear, and infinite ado about
+nothing, as were seldom heard of before. For except Friedrich Wilhelm
+drilling his 50,000 soldiers (80,000 gradually, and gradually even
+twice that number), I see no Crowned Head in Europe that is not, with
+immeasurable apparatus, simply doing ZERO. Alas, in an age of universal
+infidelity to Heaven, where the Heavenly Sun has SUNK, there occur
+strange Spectre-huntings. Which is a fact worth laying to heart.--Duel
+of Twenty Years with Elizabeth Farnese, about the eventualities of Parma
+and Piacensa, and the Shadow of the lost Crown of Spain; this was the
+first grand Spectrality of Kaiser Karl's existence; but this was not the
+whole of them.
+
+
+
+
+IMPERIAL MAJESTY'S PRAGMATIC SANCTION.
+
+Kaiser Karl meanwhile was rather short of heirs; which formed another
+of his real troubles, and involved him in much shadow-hunting. His Wife,
+the Serene Brunswick Empress whom we spoke of above, did at length bring
+him children, brought him a boy even; but the boy died within the year;
+and, on the whole, there remained nothing but two Daughters; Maria
+Theresa the elder of them, born 1717,--the prettiest little maiden in
+the world;--no son to inherit Kaiser Karl. Under which circumstances
+Kaiser Karl produced now, in the Year 1724, a Document which he had
+executed privately as long ago as 1713, only his Privy Councillors and
+other Official witnesses knowing of it then; [19th April, 1713 (Stenzel,
+iii. 5222).] and solemnly publishes it to the world, as a thing all men
+are to take notice of. All men had notice enough of this Imperial bit
+of Sheepskin, before they got done with it, five-and-twenty years hence.
+[Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748.] A very famous Pragmatic Sanction; now
+published for the world's comfort!
+
+By which Document, Kaiser Karl had formally settled, and fixed according
+to the power he has, in the shape of what they call a Pragmatic
+Sanction, or unalterable Ordinance in his Imperial House, "That, failing
+Heirs-male, his Daughters, his Eldest Daughter, should succeed him;
+failing Daughters, his Nieces; and in short, that Heirs-female ranking
+from their kinship to Kaiser Karl, and not to any prior Kaiser, should
+be as good as Heirs-male of Karl's body would have been." A Pragmatic
+Sanction is the high name he gives this document, or the Act it
+represents; "Pragmatic Sanction" being, in the Imperial Chancery and
+some others, the received title for Ordinances of a very irrevocable
+nature, which a sovereign makes, in affairs that belong wholly to
+himself, or what he reckons his own rights. [A rare kind of Deed, it
+would seem; and all the more solemn. In 1438, Charles VI. of France,
+conceding the Gallican Church its Liberties, does, it by "SANCTION
+PRAGMATIQUE;" Carlos III. of Spain (in 1759, "settling the Kingdom of
+the Two Sicilies on his third son") does the like,--which is the last
+instance of "PRAGMATIC SANCTION" in this world.]
+
+This Pragmatic Sanction of Kaiser Karl's, executed 19th April, 1713,
+was promulgated, "gradually," now here now there, from 1720 to 1724,
+[Stenzel, pp. 522, 523.]--in which later year it became universally
+public; and was transmitted to all Courts and Sovereignties, as an
+unalterable law of Things Imperial. Thereby the good man hopes his
+beautiful little Theresa, now seven years old, may succeed him, all as
+a son would have done, in the Austrian States and Dignities; and
+incalculable damages, wars, and chances of war, be prevented, for his
+House and for all the world.
+
+The world, incredulous of to-morrow, in its lazy way, was not
+sufficiently attentive to this new law of things. Some who were
+personally interested, as the Saxon Sovereignty, and the Bavarian,
+denied that it was just: reminded Kaiser-Karl that he was not the Noah
+or Adam of Kaisers; and that the case of Heirs-female was not quite
+a new idea on sheepskin. No; there are older Pragmatic Sanctions
+and settlements, by prior Kaisers of blessed memory; under which, if
+Daughters are to come in, we, descended from Imperial Daughters of
+older standing, shall have a word to say!--To this Kaiser Karl answers
+steadily, with endless argument, That every Kaiser is a Patriarch,
+and First Man, in such matters; and that so it has been pragmatically
+sanctioned by him, and that so it shall and must irrevocably be. To the
+other Powers, and indolent impartial Sovereigns of the world, he was
+lavish in embassies; in ardent representations; and spared no pains in
+convincing them that to-morrow would surely come, and that then it would
+be a blessedness to have accepted this Pragmatic Sanction, and see
+it lying for you as a Law of Nature to go by, and avoid incalculable
+controversies.
+
+This was another vast Shadow, or confused high-piled continent of
+shadows, to which our poor Kaiser held with his customary tenacity. To
+procure adherences and assurances to this dear Pragmatic Sanction, was,
+even more than the shadow of the Spanish Crown, and above all after he
+had quitted that, the one grand business of his Life henceforth. With
+which he kept all Europe in perpetual travail and diplomacy; raying
+out ambassadors, and less ostensible agents, with bribes, and with
+entreaties and proposals, into every high Sovereign Court and every low;
+negotiating unweariedly by all methods, with all men. For it was his
+evening-song and his morning-prayer; the grand meaning of Life to him,
+till Life ended. You would have said, the first question he asks of
+every creature is, "Will you covenant for my Pragmatic Sanction with me?
+Oh, agree to it; accept that new Law of Nature: when the morrow comes,
+it will be salutary for you!"
+
+Most of the Foreign Potentates idly accepted the thing,--as things of
+a distant contingent kind are accepted;--made Treaty on it, since the
+Kaiser seemed so extremely anxious. Only Bavaria, having heritable
+claims, never would. Saxony too (August the Strong), being in the
+like case, or a better, flatly refused for a long time; would not,
+at all,--except for a consideration. Bright little Prince Eugene, who
+dictated square miles of Letters and DIplomacies on the subject (Letters
+of a steady depth of dulness, which at last grows almost sublime), was
+wont to tell his Majesty: "Treatying, your Majesty? A well-trained
+Army and a full Treasury; that is the only Treaty that will make this
+Pragmatic Sanction valid!" But his Majesty never would believe. So the
+bright old Eugene dictated,--or, we hope and guess, he only gave his
+clerks some key-word, and signed his name (in three languages, "Eugenio
+von Savoye") to these square miles of dull epistolary matter,--probably
+taking Spanish snuff when he had done. For he wears it in both
+waistcoat-pockets;--has (as his Portraits still tell us) given up
+breathing by the nose. The bright little soul, with a flash in him as of
+Heaven's own lightning; but now growing very old and snuffy.
+
+Shadow of Pragmatic Sanction, shadow of the Spanish Crown,--it was such
+shadow-huntings of the Kaiser in Vienna, it was this of the Pragmatic
+Sanction most of all, that thwarted our Prussian Double-Marriage, which
+lay so far away from it. This it was that pretty nearly broke the hearts
+of Friedrich, Wilhelmina, and their Mother and Father. For there never
+was such negotiating; not for admittance to the Kingdom of Heaven, in
+the pious times. And the open goings-forth of it, still more the secret
+minings and mole-courses of it, were into all places. Above ground and
+below, no Sovereign mortal could say he was safe from it, let him agree
+or not. Friedrich Wilhelm had cheerfully, and with all his heart, agreed
+to the Pragmatic Sanction; this above ground, in sight of the sun; and
+rashly fancied he had then done with it. Till, to his horror, he found
+the Imperial moles, by way of keeping assurance doubly sure, had been
+under the foundations of his very house for long years past, and had all
+but brought it down about him in the most hideous manner!--
+
+
+
+
+THIRD SHADOW: IMPERIAL MAJESTY'S OSTEND COMPANY.
+
+Another object which Kaiser Karl pursued with some diligence in these
+times, and which likewise proved a shadow, much disturbance as it
+gave mankind, was his "Ostend East-India Company." The Kaiser had
+seen impoverished Spain, rich England, rich Holland; he had taken up a
+creditable notion about commerce and its advantages. He said to himself,
+Why should not my Netherlands trade to the East, as well as these
+English and Dutch, and grow opulent like them? He instituted (OCTROYA)
+an "Ostend East-India Company," under due Patents and Imperial
+Sheepskins, of date 17th December, 1722, [Buchholz, i. 88; Pfeffel,
+_Abrege Chronologique de l'Histoire d'Allemagne_ (Park, 1776), ii.
+522.] gave it what freedom he could to trade to the East. "Impossible!"
+answered the Dutch, with distraction in their aspect; "Impossible, we
+say; contrary to Treaty of Westphalia, to Utrecht, to Barrier Treaty;
+and destructive to the best interests of mankind, especially to us and
+our trade-profits! We shall have to capture your ships, if you ever send
+any."
+
+To which the Kaiser counterpleaded, earnestly, diligently, for the space
+of seven years,--to no effect. "We will capture your ships if you ever
+send any," answered the Dutch and English. What ships ever could have
+been sent from Ostend to the East, or what ill they could have done
+there, remains a mystery, owing to the monopolizing Maritime Powers.
+
+The Kaiser's laudable zeal for commerce had to expend itself in his
+Adriatic Territories,--giving privileges to the Ports of Trieste and
+Fiume; [Hormayr, _OEsterreichischer Plutarch,_ x. 101.] making roads
+through the Dalmatian Hill-Countries, which are useful to this day;--but
+could not operate on the Netherlands in the way proposed. The Kaiser's
+Imperial Ostend East-India Company, which convulsed the Diplomatic mind
+for seven years to come, and made Europe lurch from side to side in a
+terrific manner, proved a mere paper Company; never sent any ships,
+only produced Diplomacies, and "had the honor to be." This was the third
+grand Shadow which the Kaiser chased, shaking all the world, poor crank
+world, as he strode after it; and this also ended in zero, and
+several tons of diplomatic correspondence, carried once by breathless
+estaffettes, and now silent, gravitating towards Acheron all of them,
+and interesting to the spiders only.
+
+Poor good Kaiser: they say he was a humane stately gentleman, stately
+though shortish; fond of pardoning criminals where he could; very polite
+to Muratori and the Antiquaries, even to English Rymer, in opening his
+Archives to them,--and made roads in the Dalmatian Hill-Country, which
+remain to this day. I do not wonder he grew more and more saturnine, and
+addicted to solid taciturn field-sports. His Political "Perforce-Hunt
+(PARFORCE JAGD)," with so many two-footed terriers, and legationary
+beagles, distressing all the world by their baying and their burrowing,
+had proved to be of Shadows; and melted into thin air, to a very
+singular degree!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III. -- THE SEVEN CRISES OR EUROPEAN TRAVAIL-THROES.
+
+In process of this so terrific Duel with Elizabeth Farnese, and general
+combat of the Shadows, which then made Europe quake, at every new
+lunge and pass of it, and which now makes Europe yawn to hear the
+least mention of it, there came two sputterings of actual War. Byng's
+sea-victory at Messina, 1718; Spanish "Siege of Gibraltar," 1727, are
+the main phenomena of these two Wars,--England, as its wont is, taking a
+shot in both, though it has now forgotten both. And, on the whole,
+there came, so far as I can count, Seven grand diplomatic Spasms or
+Crises,--desperate general European Treatyings hither and then thither,
+solemn Congresses two of them, with endless supplementary adhesions
+by the minor powers. Seven grand mother-treaties, not to mention the
+daughters, or supplementary adhesions they had; all Europe rising
+spasmodically seven times, and doing its very uttermost to quell this
+terrible incubus; all Europe changing color seven times, like a lobster
+boiling, for twenty years. Seven diplomatic Crises, we say, marked
+changings of color in the long-suffering lobster; and two so-called
+Wars,--before this enormous zero could be settled. Which high Treaties
+and Transactions, human nature, after much study of them, grudges to
+enumerate. Apanage for Baby Carlos, ghost of a Pragmatic Sanction; these
+were a pair of causes for mankind! Be no word spoken of them, except
+with regret and on evident compulsion.
+
+For the reader's convenience we must note the salient points; but grudge
+to do it. Salient points, now mostly wrapt in Orcus, and terrestrially
+interesting only to the spiders,--except on an occasion of this kind,
+when part of them happens to stick to the history of a memorable man, To
+us they are mere bubblings-up of the general putrid fermentation of the
+then Political World; and are too unlovely to be dwelt on longer than
+indispensable. Triple Alliance, Quadruple Alliance, Congress of Cambrai,
+Congress of Soissons; Conference of Pardo, Treaty of Hanover, Treaty of
+Wusterhausen, what are they? Echo answers, What? Ripperda and the Queen
+of Spain, Kaiser Karl and his Pragmatic Sanction, are fallen dim to
+every mind. The Troubles of Thorn (sad enough Papist-Protestant tragedy
+in their time),--who now cares to know of them? It is much if we find
+a hearing for the poor Salzburg Emigrants when they get into Preussen
+itself. Afflicted human nature ought to be, at last, delivered from
+the palpably superfluous; and if a few things memorable are to be
+remembered, millions of things unmemorable must first be honestly
+buried and forgotten! But to our affair,--that of marking the chief
+bubblings-up in the above-said Universal Putrid Fermentation, so far as
+they concern us.
+
+
+
+
+CONGRESS OF CAMBRAI.
+
+We already saw Byng sea fighting in the Straits of Messina; that was
+part of Crisis Second,--sequel, in powder-and-ball, of Crisis First,
+which had been in paper till then. The Powers had interfered, by Triple,
+by Quadruple Alliance, to quench the Spanish-Austrian Duel (about
+Apanage for Baby Carlos, and a quantity of other Shadows): "Triple
+Alliance" [4th January, 1717.] was, we may say, when France, England,
+Holland laboriously sorted out terms of agreement between Kaiser and
+Termagant: "Quadruple" [18th July, 1718.] was when Kaiser, after much
+coaxing, acceded, as fourth party; and said gloomily, "Yes, then."
+Byng's Sea-fight was when Termagant said, "No, by--the Plots of
+Alberoni! Never will I, for my part, accede to such terms!" and attacked
+the poor Kaiser in his Sicilies and elsewhere. Byng's Sea-fight, in aid
+of a suffering Kaiser and his Sicilies, in consequence. Furthermore,
+the French invaded Spain, till Messina were retaken; nay the English, by
+land too, made a dash at Spain, "Descent on Vigo" as they call it,--in
+reference to which take the following stray Note:--
+
+"That same year [1719, year after Byng's Sea-fight, Messina just
+about recaptured], there took effect, planned by the vigorous Colonel
+Stanhope, our Minister at Madrid, who took personal share in the thing,
+a 'Descent on Vigo,' sudden swoop-down upon Town and shipping in those
+Gallician, north-west regions. Which was perfectly successful,--Lord
+Cobham leading;--and made much noise among mankind. Filled all Gazettes
+at that time;--but now, again, is all fallen silent for us,--except this
+one thrice-insignificant point, That there was in it, 'in Handyside's
+Regiment,' a Lieutenant of Foot, by name STERNE, who had left, with his
+poor Wife at Plymouth, a very remarkable Boy called Lorry, or LAWRENCE;
+known since that to all mankind. When Lorry in his LIFE writes, 'my
+Father went on the Vigo expedition,' readers may understand this was it.
+Strange enough: that poor Lieutenant of Foot is now pretty much all
+that is left of this sublime enterprise upon Vigo, in the memory of
+mankind;--hanging there, as if by a single hair, till poor TRISTRAM
+SHANDY be forgotten too." [_Memoirs of Laurence Sterne, written by
+himself for his Daughter (see Annual Register,_ Year 1775, pp. 50-52).]
+
+In short, the French and even the English invaded Spain; English Byng
+and others sank Spanish ships: Termagant was obliged to pack away her
+Alberoni, and give in. She had to accede to "Quadruple Alliance," after
+all; making it, so to speak, a Quintuple one; making Peace, in fact,
+[17th February, 1720.]--general Congress to be held at Cambrai and
+settle the details.
+
+Congress of Cambrai met accordingly; in 1722,--"in the course of the
+year," Delegates slowly raining in,--date not fixable to a day or month.
+Congress was "sat," as we said,--or, alas, was only still endeavoring to
+get seated, and wandering about among the chairs,--when George I. came
+to Charlottenburg that evening, October, 1723, and surveyed Wilhelmina
+with a candle. More inane Congress never met in this world, nor will
+meet. Settlement proved so difficult; all the more, as neither of
+the quarrelling parties wished it. Kaiser and Termagant, fallen as if
+exhausted, had not the least disposition to agree; lay diplomatically
+gnashing their teeth at one another, ready to fight again should
+strength return. Difficult for third parties to settle on behalf of such
+a pair. Nay at length the Kaiser's Ostend Company came to light: what
+will third parties, Dutch and English especially, make of that?
+
+This poor Congress---let the reader fancy it--spent two years in
+"arguments about precedencies," in mere beatings of the air; could not
+get seated at all, but wandered among the chairs, till "February, 1724."
+Nor did it manage to accomplish any work whatever, even then; the most
+inane of Human Congresses; and memorable on that account, if on no
+other. There, in old stagnant Cambrai, through the third year and into
+the fourth, were Delegates, Spanish, Austrian, English, Dutch, French,
+of solemn outfit, with a big tail to each,--"Lord Whitworth" whom I do
+not know, "Lord Polwarth" (Earl of Marchmont that will be, a friend of
+Pope's), were the English Principals: [Scholl, ii. 197.]--there, for
+about four years, were these poor fellow-creatures busied, baling out
+water with sieves. Seen through the Horn-Gate of Dreams, the figure of
+them rises almost grand on the mind.
+
+A certain bright young Frenchman, Francois Arouet,--spoiled for a solid
+law-career, but whose OEDIPE we saw triumphing in the Theatres, and
+who will, under the new name of VOLTAIRE, become very memorable to
+us,--happened to be running towards Holland that way, one of his many
+journeys thitherward; and actually saw this Congress, then in the first
+year of its existence. Saw it, probably dined with it. A Letter of his
+still extant, not yet fallen to the spiders, as so much else has done,
+testifies to this fact. Let us read part of it, the less despicable
+part,--as a Piece supremely insignificant, yet now in a manner the one
+surviving Document of this extraordinary Congress; Congress's own works
+and history having all otherwise fallen to the spiders forever. The
+Letter is addressed to Cardinal Dubois;--for Dubois, "with the face like
+a goat," [Herzogin von Orleans, BRIEFE.] yet lived (first year of this
+Congress); and Regent d'Orleans lived, intensely interested here as
+third party:--and a goat-faced Cardinal, once pimp and lackey, ugliest
+of created souls, Archbishop of this same Cambrai "by Divine permission"
+and favor of Beelzebub, was capable of promoting a young fellow if he
+chose:--
+
+"TO HIS EMINENCE CARDINAL DUBOIS (from Arouet Junior).
+
+"CAMBRAI, July, 1722.
+
+"... We are just arrived in your City, Monseigneur; where, I think,
+all the Ambassadors and all the Cooks in Europe have given one another
+rendezvous. It seems as if all the Ministers of Germany had assembled
+here for the purpose of getting their Emperor's health drunk. As to
+Messieurs the Ambassadors of Spain, one of them hears two masses a day,
+and the other manages the troop of players. The English Ministers [a
+LORD POLWARTH and a LORD WHITWORTH] send many couriers to Champagne, and
+few to London. For the rest, nobody expects your Eminence here; it is
+not thought you will quit the Palais-Royal to visit the sheep of your
+flock in these parts [no!], it would be too bad for your Eminence and
+for us all.... Think sometimes, Monseigneur, of a man who [regards your
+goat-faced Eminence as a beautiful ingenious creature; and such a
+hand in conversation as never was]. The one thing I will ask [of your
+goat-faced Eminence] at Paris will be, to have the goodness to talk to
+me." [_OEuvres de Voltaire,_ 97 vols. (Paris, 1825-1834), lxviii. 95,
+96.]
+
+Alas, alas!--The more despicable portions of this Letter we omit, as
+they are not history of the Congress, but of Arouet Junior on the
+shady side. So much will testify that this Congress did exist; that
+its wiggeries and it were not always, what they now are, part of a
+nightmare-vision in Human History.--
+
+Elizabeth Farnese, seeing at what rate the Congress of Cambrai sped,
+lost all patience with it; and getting more and more exasperations
+there, at length employed one Ripperda, a surprising Dutch Black-Artist
+whom she now had for Minister, to pull the floor from beneath it (so
+to speak), and send it home in that manner. Which Ripperda did. An
+appropriate enough catastrophe, comfortable to the reader; upon which
+perhaps he will not grudge to read still another word?
+
+
+
+
+CONGRESS OF CAMBRAI GETS THE FLOOR PULLED FROM UNDER IT.
+
+Termagant Elizabeth had now one Ripperda for Minister; a surprising
+Dutch adventurer, once secretary of some Dutch embassy at Madrid;
+who, discerning how the land lay, had broken loose from that subaltern
+career, had changed his religion, insinuated himself into Elizabeth's
+royal favor; and was now "Duke de Ripperda," and a diplomatic bull-dog
+of the first quality, full of mighty schemes and hopes; in brief, a new
+Alberoni to the Termagant Queen. This Ripperda had persuaded her (the
+third year of our inane Congress now running out, to no purpose), That
+he, if he were sent direct to Vienna, could reconcile the Kaiser to her
+Majesty, and bring them to Treaty, independently of Congresses. He
+was sent accordingly, in all privacy; had reported himself as laboring
+there, with the best outlooks, for some while past; when, still early in
+1725, there occurred on the part of France,--where Regent d'Orleans was
+now dead, and new politics bad come in vogue,--that "sending back,"
+of the poor little Spanish: Infanta, ["5th April, 1725, quitted Paris"
+(Barbier, _Journal du Regne de Louis XV.,_ i. 218).] and marrying of
+young Louis XV. elsewhere, which drove Elizabeth and the Court of Spain,
+not unnaturally, into a very delirium of indignation.
+
+Why they sent the poor little Lady home on those shocking terms? It
+seems there was no particular reason, except that French Louis was now
+about fifteen, and little Spanish Theresa was only eight; and that,
+under Duc de Bourbon, the new Premier, and none of the wisest, there
+was, express or implicit, "an ardent wish to see royal progeny secured."
+For which, of course, a wife of eight years would not answer. So she
+was returned; and even in a blundering way, it is said,--the French
+Ambassador at Madrid having prefaced his communication, not with light
+adroit preludings of speech, but with a tempest of tears and howling
+lamentations, as if that were the way to conciliate King Philip and
+his Termagant Elizabeth. Transport of indignation was the natural
+consequence on their part; order to every Frenchman to be across the
+border within, say eight-and-forty hours; rejection forever of all
+French mediation at Cambrai or elsewhere; question to the English, "Will
+you mediate for us, then?" To which the answer being merely "Hm!" with
+looks of delay,--order by express to Ripperda, to make straightway a
+bargain with the Kaiser; almost any bargain, so it were made at once.
+Ripperda made a bargain: Treaty of Vienna, 30th April, 1725: [Scholl,
+ii. 201; Coxe, _Walpole,_ i. 239-250.] "Titles and Shadows each of us
+shall keep for his own lifetime, then they shall drop. As to realities
+again, to Parma and Piacenza among the rest, let these be as in the
+Treaty of Utrecht; arrangeable in the lump;--and indeed, of Parma and
+Piacenza perhaps the less we say, the better at present." This was, in
+substance, Ripperda's Treaty; the Third great European travail-throe, or
+change of color in the long-suffering lobster. Whereby, of course, the
+Congress of Cambrai did straightway disappear, the floor miraculously
+vanishing under it; and sinks--far below human eye-reach by this
+time--towards the Bottomless Pool, ever since. Such was the beginning,
+such the end of that Congress, which Arouet LE JEUNE, in 1722, saw as a
+contemporary Fact, drinking champagne in Ramillies wigs, and arranging
+comedies for itself.
+
+
+
+
+FRANCE AND THE BRITANNIC MAJESTY TRIM THE SHIP AGAIN: HOW FRIEDRICH
+WILHELM CAME INTO IT. TREATY OF HANOVER, 1725.
+
+The publication of this Treaty of Vienna (30th April, 1725),--miraculous
+disappearance of the Congress of Cambrai by withdrawal of the floor
+from under it, and close union of the Courts of Spain and Vienna as
+the outcome of its slow labors,--filled Europe, and chiefly the late
+mediating Powers, with amazement, anger, terror. Made Europe lurch
+suddenly to the other side, as we phrased it,--other gunwale now under
+water. Wherefore, in Heaven's name, trim your ship again, if possible,
+ye high mediating Powers. This the mediating Powers were laudably
+alert to do. Duc de Bourbon, and his young King about to marry, were of
+pacific tendencies; anxious for the Balance: still more was Fleury,
+who succeeded Duc de Bourbon. Cardinal Fleury (with his pupil Louis XV.
+under him, producing royal progeny and nothing worse or better as
+yet) began, next year, his long supremacy in France; an aged reverend
+gentleman, of sly, delicately cunning ways, and disliking war, as George
+I. did, unless when forced on him: now and henceforth, no mediating
+power more anxious than France to have the ship in trim.
+
+George and Bourbon laid their heads together, deeply pondering this
+little less than awful state of the Terrestrial Balance; and in about
+six months they, in their quiet way, suddenly came out with a Fourth
+Crisis on the astonished populations, so as to right the ship's
+trim again, and more. "Treaty of Hanover," this was their unexpected
+manoeuvre; done quietly at Herrenhausen, when his Majesty next
+went across for the Hanover hunting-season. Mere hunting:--but the
+diplomatists, as well as the beagles, were all in readiness there. Even
+Friedrich Wilhelm, ostensibly intent on hunting, was come over thither,
+his abstruse Ilgens, with their inkhorns, escorting him: Friedrich
+Wilhelm, hunting in unexpected sort, was persuaded to sign this Treaty;
+which makes it unusually interesting to us. An exceptional procedure on
+the part of Friedrich Wilhelm, who beyond all Sovereigns stays well
+at home, careless of affairs that are not his:--procedure betokening
+cordiality at Hanover; and of good omen for the Double-Marriage?
+
+Yes, surely;--and yet something more, on Friedrich Wilhelm's part. His
+rights on the Cleve-Julich Countries; reversion of Julich and Berg,
+once Karl Philip shall decease:--perhaps these high Powers, for a
+consideration, will guarantee one's undoubted rights there? It is
+understood they gave promises of this kind, not too specific. Nay we
+hear farther a curious thing: "France and England, looking for immediate
+war with the Kaiser, advised Friedrich Wilhelm to assert his rights
+on Silesia." Which would have been an important procedure! Friedrich
+Wilhelm, it is added, had actual thoughts of it; the Kaiser, in those
+matters of the RITTER-DIENST, of the HEIDELBERG PROTESTANTS, and
+wherever a chance was, had been unfriendly, little less than insulting,
+to Friedrich Wilhelm: "Give me one single Hanoverian brigade, to
+show that you go along with me!" said his Prussian Majesty;--but the
+Britannic never altogether would. [_OEuvres de Frederic,_ i.
+153.] Certain it is, Friedrich Wilhelm signed: a man with such
+Fighting-Apparatus as to be important in a Hanover Treaty. "Balance of
+Power, they tell me, is in a dreadful way: certainly if one can help
+the Balance a little, why not? But Julich and Berg, one's own outlook
+of reversion there, that is the point to be attended to:--Balance, I
+believe, will somehow shift for itself!" On these principles, Friedrich
+Wilhelm signed, while ostensibly hunting. [Fassmann, p. 368; Forster,
+_ Urkundenbuch,_ p. 67.] Treaty of Hanover, which was to trim the ship
+again, or even to make it heel the other way, dates itself 3d September,
+1725, and is of this purport: "We three, France, England, Prussia to
+stand by each other as one man, in case any of us is attacked,--will
+invite Holland, Denmark, Sweden and every pacific Sovereignty to join us
+in such convention,"--as they all gradually did, had Friedrich Wilhelm
+but stood firm.
+
+For it is a state of the Balances little less than awful. Rumor goes
+that, by the Ripperda bargain, fatal to mankind, Don Carlos was to
+get the beautiful young Maria Theresa to wife: that would settle the
+Parma-Piacenza business and some others; that would be a compensation
+with a witness! Spain and Austria united, as in Karl V.'s time; or
+perhaps some Succession War, or worse, to fight over again!--
+
+Fleury and George, as Duc de Bourbon and George had done, though
+both pacific gentlemen, brandished weapons at the Kaiser; strongly
+admonishing him to become less formidable, or it would be worse for him.
+Possible indeed, in such a shadow-hunting, shadow-hunted hour! Fleury
+and George stand looking with intense anxiety into a certain spectral
+something, which they call the Balance of Power; no end to their
+exorcisms in that matter. Truly, if each of the Royal Majesties and
+Serene Highnesses would attend to his own affairs,--doing his utmost to
+better his own land and people, in earthly and in heavenly respects, a
+little,--he would find it infinitely profitabler for himself and others.
+And the Balance of Power would settle, in that case, as the laws
+of gravity ordered: which is its one method of settling, after all
+diplomacy!--Fleury and George, by their manifestoing, still more by
+their levying of men, George I. shovelling out his English subsidies
+as usual, created deadly qualms in the Kaiser; who still found it
+unpleasant to "admit Spanish Garrisons in Parma;" but found likewise his
+Termagant Friend inexorably positive on that score; and knew not what
+would become of him, if he had to try fighting, and the Sea-Powers
+refused him cash to do it.
+
+Hereby was the ship trimmed, and more; ship now lurching to the
+other side again. George I. goes subsidying Hessians, Danes; sounding
+manifestoes, beating drums, in an alarming manner: and the Kaiser,
+except it were in Russia, with the new Czarina Catherine I. (that brown
+little woman, now become Czarina [8th February, 1725. Treaty with Kaiser
+(6th August, 1726) went to nothing on her death, 11th May, 1727.]),
+finds no ally to speak of. An unlucky, spectre-hunting, spectre-hunted
+Kaiser; who, amid so many drums, manifestoes, menaces, is now rolling
+eyes that witness everywhere considerable dismay. This is the Fourth
+grand Crisis of Europe; crisis or travail-throe of Nature, bringing
+forth, and unable to do it, Baby Carlos's Apanage and the Pragmatic
+Sanction. Fourth conspicuous change of color to the universal lobster,
+getting itself boiled on those sad terms, for twenty years. For its
+sins, we need not doubt; for its own long-continued cowardices, sloths
+and greedy follies, as well as those of Kaiser Karl!--
+
+At this Fourth change we will gladly leave the matter, for a time;
+much wishing it might be forever. Alas, as if that were possible to us!
+Meanwhile, let afflicted readers, looking before and after, readier to
+forget than to remember in such a case, accept this Note, or Summary of
+all the Seven together, by way of help:--
+
+
+
+
+TRAVAIL-THROES OF NATURE FOR BABY CARLOS'S ITALIAN APANAGE; SEVEN IN
+NUMBER.
+
+1. Triple Alliance, English, Dutch, French (4th January, 1717), saying,
+"Peace, then! No Alberoni-plotting; no Duel-fighting permitted!"
+Same Powers, next year, proposing Terms of Agreement; Kaiser gloomily
+accepting them; which makes it Quadruple Alliance (18th July, 1718);
+Termagant indignantly refusing,--with attack on the Kaiser's Sicilies.
+
+2. First Sputter of War; Byng's Sea-fight, and the other pressures,
+compelling Termagant: Peace (26th January, 1720); Congress of Cambrai to
+settle the Apanage and other points.
+
+3. Congress of Cambrai, a weariness to gods and men, gets the floor
+pulled from under it (Ripperda's feat, 30th April, 1725); so that Kaiser
+and Termagant stand ranked together, Apanage wrapt in mystery,--to the
+terror of mankind.
+
+4. Treaty of Hanover (France, England, Prussia, 3d September, 1725)
+restores the Balances, and more. War imminent. Prussia privately falls
+off,--as we shall see.
+
+[These first Four lie behind us, at this point; but there are Three
+others still ahead, which we cannot hope to escape altogether; namely:]
+
+
+5. Second Sputter of War: Termagant besieges Gibraltar (4th March,
+1727--6th March, 1728): Peace at that latter date;--Congress of Soissons
+to settle the Apanage and other points, as formerly.
+
+6. Congress of Soissons (14th June, 1728--9th November, 1729), as
+formerly, cannot in the least: Termagaut whispers England;--there is
+Treaty of Seville (9th November, 1729), France and England undertaking
+for the Apanage. Congress vanishes; Kaiser is left solitary, with the
+shadow of Pragmatic Sanction, in the night of things. Pause of an awful
+nature:--but Fleury does not hasten with the Apanage, as promised.
+Whereupon, at length,
+
+7. Treaty of Vienna (16th March, 1731): Sea-Powers, leading Termagant by
+the hand, Sea-Powers and no France, unite with Kaiser again, according
+to the old laws of Nature;--and Baby Carlos gets his Apanage, in due
+course;--but does not rest content with it, Mamma nor he, very long!
+
+Huge spectres and absurd bugaboos, stalking through the brain of dull
+thoughtless pusillanimous mankind, do, to a terrible extent, tumble
+hither and thither, and cause to lurch from side to side, their ship
+of state, and all that is embarked there, BREAKFAST-TABLE, among other
+things. Nevertheless, if they were only bugaboos, and mere Shadows
+caused by Imperial hand-lanterns in the general Night of the
+world,--ought they to be spoken of in the family, when avoidable?
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV. -- DOUBLE-MARRIAGE TREATY CANNOT BE SIGNED.
+
+Hitherto the world-tides, and ebbs and flows of external Politics, had,
+by accident, rather forwarded, than hindered the Double-Marriage. In
+the rear of such a Treaty of Hanover, triumphantly righting the European
+Balances by help of Friedrich Wilhelm, one might have hoped this little
+domestic Treaty would, at last, get itself signed. Queen Sophie did
+hasten off to Hanover, directly after her husband had left it under
+those favorable aspects: but Papa again proved unmanageable; the Treaty
+could not be achieved.
+
+Alas, and why not? Parents and Children, on both sides, being really
+desirous of it, what reason is there but it should in due time come to
+perfection, and, without annihilating Time and Space, make four lovers
+happy? No reason. Rubs doubtless had arisen since that Visit of George
+I., discordant procedures, chiefly about Friedrich Wilhelm's recruiting
+operations in the Hanover territory, as shall be noted by and by: but
+these the ever-wakeful enthusiasm of Queen Sophie, who had set her whole
+heart with a female fixity on this Double-Marriage Project, had smoothed
+down again: and now, Papa and Husband being so blessedly united in their
+World Politics, why not sign the Marriage-Treaty? Honored Majesty-Papa,
+why not!--"Tush, child, you do not understand. In these tremendous
+circumstances, the celestial Sign of the BALANCE just about canting, and
+the Obliquity of the Ecliptic like to alter, how can one think of little
+marriages? Wait till the Obliquity of the Ecliptic come steadily to its
+old pitch!"--
+
+Truth is, George was in general of a slow, solemn, Spanish turn of
+manners; "intolerably proud, too, since he got that English dignity,"
+says Wilhelmina: he seemed always tacitly to look down on Friedrich
+Wilhelm, as if the Prussian Majesty were a kind of inferior clownish
+King in comparison. It is certain he showed no eagerness to get the
+Treaty perfected. Again and again, when specially applied to by Queen
+Sophie, on Friedrich Wilhelm's order, he intimated only: "It was a fixed
+thing, but not to be hurried,--English Parliaments were concerned in it,
+the parties were still young," and so on;--after which brief answer
+he would take you to the window, and ask, "If you did not think the
+Herrenhausen Gardens and their Leibnitz waterworks, and clipped-beech
+walls were rather fine?" [Pollnitz, _ Memoiren,_ ii. 226, 228, &c.]
+
+In fact, the English Parliaments, from whom money was so often demanded
+for our fat Improper Darlingtons, lean Improper Kendals and other royal
+occasions, would naturally have to make a marriage-revenue for this fine
+Grandson of ours;--Grandson Fred, who is now a young lout of, eighteen;
+leading an extremely dissolute life, they say, at Hanover; and by no
+means the most beautiful of mortals, either he or the foolish little
+Father of him, to our old sad heart. They can wait, they can wait! said
+George always.
+
+But undoubtedly he did intend that both Marriages should take effect:
+only he was slow; and the more you hurried him, perhaps the slower. He
+would have perfected the Treaty "next year," say the Authorities; meant
+to do so, if well let alone: but Townshend whispered withal, "Better
+not urge him." Surly George was always a man of his word; no treachery
+intended by him, towards Friedrich Wilhelm or any man. It is very clear,
+moreover, that Friedrich Wilhelm, in this Autumn 1725, was, and was like
+to be, of high importance to King George; a man not to be angered by
+dishonorable treatment, had such otherwise been likely on George's part.
+Nevertheless George did not sign the Treaty "next year" either,--such
+things having intervened;--nor the next year after that, for reasons
+tragically good on the latter occasion!
+
+These delays about the Double-Marriage Treaty are not a pleasing
+feature of it to Friedrich Wilhelm; who is very capable of being hurt by
+slights; who, at any rate, dislikes to have loose thrums flying about,
+or that the business of to-day should be shoved over upon to-morrow. And
+so Queen Sophie has her own sore difficulties; driven thus between
+the Barbarians (that is, her Husband), and the deep Sea (that is, her
+Father), to and fro. Nevertheless, since all parties to the matter
+wished it, Sophie and the younger parties getting even enthusiastic
+about it; and since the matter itself was good, agreeable so far
+to Prussia and England, to Protestant Germany and to Heaven and
+Earth,--might not Sophie confidently hope to vanquish these and other
+difficulties; and so bring all things to a happy close?
+
+Had it not been for the Imperial Shadow-huntings, and this rickety
+condition of the celestial Balance! Alas, the outer elements interfered
+with Queen Sophie in a singular manner. Huge foreign world-movements,
+springing from Vienna and a spectre-haunted Kaiser, and spreading like
+an avalanche over all the Earth, snatched up this little Double-Marriage
+question; tore it along with them, reeling over precipices, one knew not
+whitherward, at such a rate as was seldom seen before. Scarcely in
+the Minerva Press is there record of such surprising, infinite and
+inextricable obstructions to a wedding or a double-wedding. Time and
+space, which cannot be annihilated to make two lovers happy, were here
+turned topsy-turvy, as it were, to make four lovers,--four, or at the
+very least three, for Wilhelmina will not admit she was ever the least
+in love, not she, poor soul, either with loose Fred or his English
+outlooks,--four young creatures, and one or more elderly persons,
+superlatively wretched; and even, literally enough, to do all but kill
+some of them.
+
+What is noteworthy too, it proved wholly inane, this huge world-ocean of
+Intrigues and Imperial Necromancy; ran dry at last into absolute nothing
+even for the Kaiser, and might as well not have been. And Mother and
+Father, on the Prussian side, were driven to despair and pretty nearly
+to delirium by it; and our poor young Fritz got tormented, scourged, and
+throttled in body and in soul by it, till he grew to loathe the light of
+the sun, and in fact looked soon to have quitted said light at one stage
+of the business.
+
+We are now approaching Act Second of the Double-Marriage, where Imperial
+Ordnance-Master Graf von Seckendorf, a Black-Artist of supreme quality,
+despatched from Vienna on secret errand, "crosses the Palace Esplanade
+at Berlin on a summer evening of the year 1726;" and evokes all the
+demons on our little Crown-Prince and those dear to him. We must first
+say something of an important step, shortly antecedent thereto, which
+occurred in the Crown-Prince's educational course.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V. -- CROWN-PRINCE GOES INTO THE POTSDAM GUARDS.
+
+Amid such commotion of the foreign elements and the domestic, an
+important change occurs in the Crown-Prince's course of schooling. It is
+decided that, whatever be his progress in the speculative branches, it
+is time he should go into the Army, and practically learn soldiering.
+In his fourteenth year, 3d May, 1725, [Preuss, i. 26; 106; and _Buch fur
+Jedermann_ (a minor book of his, on the same subject, Berlin, 1837),
+ii. 13.] not long before the Treaty of Hanover, he was formally named
+Captain, by Papa in War-council. Grenadier Guards, Potsdam Lifeguards,
+to be the regiment; and next year he is nominated Major, and, a vacancy
+occurring, appointed to begin actual duty. It is on the "20th of August,
+1726, that he first leads out his battalion to the muster," on those
+terms. His age is not yet fifteen by four months;--a very tiny Major
+among those Potsdam giants; but by rank, we observe, he rides; and his
+horse is doubtless of the due height. And so the tiny Cadet-drillings
+have ended; long Files of Giants, splendent in gold-lace and
+grenadier-caps, have succeeded; and earnest work instead of mimic, in
+that matter, has begun.
+
+However it may have fared with his other school-lessons, here now is a
+school-form he is advanced to, in which there will be no resource but
+learning. Bad spelling might be overlooked by those that had charge of
+it; bad drilling is not permissible on any terms. We need not doubt the
+Crown-Prince did his soldier-duty faithfully, and learned in every point
+the conduct of an officer: penalty as of Rhadamanthus waited upon all
+failure there. That he liked it is by no means said; he much disliked
+it, and his disgusts were many. An airy young creature:--and it was
+in this time to give one instance, that that shearing of his locks
+occurred: which was spoken of above, where the Court-Chirurgus proved so
+merciful. To clog the winged Psyche in ever-returning parade-routine and
+military pipe-clay,--it seems very cruel. But it is not to be altered:
+in spite of one's disgusts, the dull work, to the last item of it,
+has daily to be done. Which proved infinitely beneficial to the
+Crown-Prince, after all. Hereby, to his Athenian-French elegancies,
+and airy promptitudes and brilliancies, there shall lie as basis an
+adamantine Spartanism and Stoicism; very rare, but very indispensable,
+for such a superstructure. Well exemplified, through after life, in this
+Crown-Prince.
+
+
+
+
+OF THE POTSDAM GIANTS, AS A FACT.
+
+His regiment was the Potsdam Grenadier Guard; that unique
+giant-regiment, of which the world has heard so much in a vague
+half-mythical way. The giant-regiment was not a Myth, however, but a
+big-boned expensive Fact, tramping very hard upon the earth at one time,
+though now gone all to the ghostly state. As it was a CLASS-BOOK, so
+to speak, of our Friedrich's,--Class-Book (printed in huge type) for a
+certain branch of his schooling, the details of which are so dim, though
+the general outcome of it proved so unforgettable,--readers, apart from
+their curiosity otherwise, may as well take a glimpse of it on this
+occasion. Vanished now, and grown a Giant Phantom, the like of it hardly
+again to be in this world; and by accident, the very smallest Figure
+ever ranked in it makes it memorable there!--
+
+With a wise instinct, Friedrich Wilhelm had discerned that all things
+in Prussia must point towards his Army; that his Army was the heart and
+pith; the State being the tree, every branch and leaf bound, after
+its sort, to be nutritive and productive for the Army's behoof. That,
+probably for any Nation in the long-run, and certainly for the Prussian
+Nation straightway, life or death depends on the Army: Friedrich
+Wilhelm's head, in an inarticulate manner, was full of this just notion;
+and all his life was spent in organizing it to a practical fact. The
+more of potential battle, the more of life is in us: a MAXIMUM of
+potential battle, therefore; and let it be the OPTIMUM in quality! How
+Friedrich Wilhelm cared, day and night, with all his heart and all his
+soul, to bring his Army to the supreme pitch, we have often heard; and
+the more we look into his ways, the more we are impressed with that
+fact. It was the central thing for him; all other things circulating
+towards it, deriving from it: no labor too great, and none too little,
+to be undergone for such an object. He watched over it like an Argus,
+with eyes that reached everywhere. Discipline shall be as exact as
+Euclid;--short of perfection we do not stop! Discipline and ever better
+discipline; enforcement of the rule in all points, improvement of the
+rule itself where possible, were the great Drill-sergeant's continual
+care. Daily had some loop fallen, which might have gone ravelling far
+enough; but daily was he there to pick it up again, and keep the web
+unrent and solidly progressive.
+
+We said, it was the "poetic ideal" of Friedrich Wilhelm; who is a dumb
+poet in several particulars,--and requires the privileges of genius
+from those that READ his dumb poem. It must be owned he rises into the
+fantastic here and there; and has crotchets of ultraperfection for his
+Army, which are not rational at all. Crotchets that grew ever madder,
+the farther he followed them. This Lifeguard Regiment of foot, for
+instance, in which the Crown-Prince now is,--Friedrich Wilhelm got it
+in his Father's time, no doubt a regiment then of fair qualities; and he
+has kept drilling it, improving it, as poets polish stanzas, unweariedly
+ever since:--and see now what it has grown to! A Potsdam Giant Regiment,
+such as the world never saw, before or since. Three Battalions of
+them,--two always here at Potsdam doing formal lifeguard duty, the third
+at Brandenburg on drill; 800 to the Battalion,--2,400 sons of Anak in
+all. Sublime enough, hugely perfect to the royal eye, such a mass
+of shining giants, in their long-drawn regularities and mathematical
+manoeuvrings,--like some streak of Promethean lightning, realized here
+at last, in the vulgar dusk of things!
+
+Truly they are men supreme in discipline, in beauty of equipment; and
+the shortest man of them rises, I think, towards seven feet, some are
+nearly nine feet high. Men from all countries; a hundred and odd come
+annually, as we saw, from Russia,--a very precious windfall: the rest
+have been collected, crimped, purchased out of every European country,
+at enormous expense, not to speak of other trouble to his Majesty. James
+Kirkman, an Irish recruit of good inches, cost him 1,200 pounds before
+he could be got inveigled, shipped and brought safe to hand. The
+documents are yet in existence; [Forster, _Handbuch der Geschichte,
+Geographie und Statistik des Preussischen Reichs_ (Berlin, 1820), iv.
+130, 132;--not in a very lucid state.] and the Portrait of this Irish
+fellow-citizen himself, who is by no means a beautiful man. Indeed, they
+are all portrayed; all the privates of this distinguished Regiment are,
+if anybody cared to look at them--Redivanoff from Moscow seems of
+far better bone than Kirkman, though still more stolid of aspect. One
+Hohmann, a born Prussian, was so tall, you could not, though yourself
+tall, touch his bare crown with your hand; August the Strong of Poland
+tried, on one occasion, and could not. Before Hohmann turned up, there
+had been "Jonas the Norwegian Blacksmith,", also a dreadfully tall
+monster. Giant "Macdoll,"--who was to be married, no consent asked on
+EITHER side, to the tall young woman, which latter turned out to be a
+decrepit OLD woman (all Jest-Books know the myth),--he also was an Irish
+Giant; his name probably M'Dowal. [Forster, _ Preussens Helden im Krieg
+und Frieden_ (Berlin, l848), i. 531; no date to the story, no evidence
+what grain of truth may be in it.] This Hohmann was now FLUGELMANN
+("fugleman" as we have named it, leader of the file), the Tallest of the
+Regiment, a very mountain of pipe-clayed flesh and bone.
+
+Here, in reference to one other of those poor Giants, is an Anecdote
+from Fassmann (who is very full on this subject of the Giants; abstruse
+Historical Fassmann, often painfully cited by us): a most small
+Anecdote, but then an indisputably certain one;--which brings back to
+us, in a strange way, the vanished Time and its populations; as the
+poorest authentic wooden lucifer may do, kindling suddenly, and'
+peopling the void Night for moments, to the seeing eye!--
+
+Fassmann, a very dark German literary man, in obsolete costume and
+garniture, how living or what doing we cannot guess, found himself at
+Paris, gazing about, in the year 1713; where, among other things, the
+Fair of St. Germain was going on. Loud, large Fair of St. Germain,
+"which lasts from Candlemas to the Monday before Easter;" and Fassmann
+one day took a walk of contemplation through the same. Much noise,
+gesticulation, little meaning. Show-booths, temporary theatres,
+merry-andrews, sleight-of-hand men; and a vast public, drinking,
+dancing, gambling, flirting, as its wont is. Nothing new for us there;
+new only that it all lies five generations from us now. Did "the Old
+Pretender," who was then in his expectant period, in this same village
+of St. Germain, see it too, as Fassmann did? And Louis XIV., he is at
+Versailles; drooping fast, very dull to his Maintenon. And our little
+Fritz in Berlin is a child in arms;--and the world is all awake as
+usual, while Fassmann strolls through this noisy inanity of show-booths,
+in the year 1713.
+
+Strolling along, Fassmann came upon a certain booth with an enormous
+Picture hung aloft in front of it: "Picture of a very tall man, in
+HEYDUC livery, coat reaching to his ankles, in grand peruke, cap and
+big heron-plume, with these words, 'LE GEANT ALLEMAND (German Giant),'
+written underneath. Partly from curiosity, partly "for country's sake,"
+Fassmann expended twopence; viewed the gigantic fellow-creature; admits
+he had never seen one so tall; though "Bentenrieder, the Imperial
+Diplomatist," thought by some to be the tallest of men, had come athwart
+him once. This giant's name was Muller; birthplace the neighborhood of
+Weissenfels;--"a Saxon like myself. He had a small German Wife, not
+half his size. He made money readily, showing himself about, in France,
+England, Holland;"--and Fassmann went his way, thinking no more of the
+fellow.--But now, continues Fassmann:--
+
+"Coming to Potsdam, thirteen years after, in the spring of 1726, by his
+Majesty's order, to"--in fact, to read the Newspapers to his Majesty,
+and be generally useful, chiefly in the Tobacco-College, as we shall
+discover,--"what was my surprise to find this same 'GEANT ALLEMAND'
+of St. Germain ranked among the King's Grenadiers! No doubt of the
+identity: I renewed acquaintance with the man; his little German Wife
+was dead; but he had got an English one instead, an uncommonly shifty
+creature. They had a neat little dwelling-house [as most of the married
+giants had], near the Palace: here the Wife sold beer [brandy not
+permissible on any terms], and lodged travellers;--I myself have lodged
+there on occasion. In the course of some years, the man took swelling in
+the legs; good for nothing as a grenadier; and was like to fall heavy
+on society. But no, his little Wife snatched him up, easily getting his
+discharge; carried him over with her to England, where he again became a
+show-giant, and they were doing very well, when last heard of,"--in the
+Country-Wakes of George II.'s early time. And that is the real Biography
+of one Potsdam Giant, by a literary gentleman who had lodged with him on
+occasion. [Fassmann, pp. 723-730.]
+
+The pay of these sublime Footguards is greatly higher than common; they
+have distinguished privileges and treatment: on the other hand, their
+discipline is nonpareil, and discharge is never to be dreamt of, while
+strength lasts. Poor Kirkman, does he sometimes think of the Hill of
+Howth, and that he will never see it more? Kirkman, I judge, is not
+given to thought;--considers that he has tobacco here, and privileges
+and perquisites; and that Howth, and Heaven itself, is inaccessible to
+many a man.
+
+
+
+
+FRIEDRICH WILHELM'S RECRUITING DIFFICULTIES.
+
+Tall men, not for this regiment only, had become a necessary of life to
+Friedrich Wilhelm. Indispensable to him almost as his daily bread, To
+his heart there is no road so ready as that of presenting a tall man
+or two. Friedrich Wilhelm's regiments are now, by his exact new
+regulations, levied and recruited each in its own Canton, or specific
+district: there all males as soon as born are enrolled; liable to serve,
+when they have grown to years and strength. All grown men (under certain
+exceptions, as of a widow's eldest son, or of the like evidently ruinous
+cases) are liable to serve; Captain of the Regiment and AMTMANN of the
+Canton settle between them which grown man it shall be. Better for you
+not to be tall! In fact it is almost a kindness of Heaven to be gifted
+with some safe impediment of body, slightly crooked back or the like, if
+you much dislike the career of honor under Friedrich Wilhelm. A general
+shadow of unquiet apprehension we can well fancy hanging over those
+rural populations, and much unpleasant haggling now and then;--nothing
+but the King's justice that can be appealed to. King's justice, very
+great indeed, but heavily checked by the King's value for handsome
+soldiers.
+
+Happily his value for industrial laborers and increase of population is
+likewise great. Townsfolk, skilful workmen as the theory supposes, are
+exempt; the more ingenious classes, generally, his Majesty exempts in
+this respect, to encourage them in others. For, on the whole, he is not
+less a Captain of Work, to his Nation, than of other things. What he did
+for Prussia in the way of industries, improvements, new manufactures,
+new methods; in settling "colonies," tearing up drowned bogs and
+subduing them into dry cornfields; in building, draining, digging, and
+encouraging or forcing others to do so, would take a long chapter. He is
+the enemy of Chaos, not the friend of it, wherever you meet with him.
+
+For example, Potsdam itself. Potsdam, now a pleasant, grassy, leafy
+place, branching out extensively in fine stone architecture, with swept
+pavements; where, as in other places, the traveller finds land and water
+separated into two firmaments,--Friedrich Wilhelm found much of it a
+quagmire, land and water still weltering in one. In these very years,
+his cuttings, embankments, buildings, pile-drivings there, are enormous;
+and his perseverance needs to be invincible. For instance, looking
+out, one morning after heavy rain, upon some extensive anti-quagmire
+operations and strong pile-drivings, he finds half a furlong of his
+latest heavy piling clean gone. What in the world has become of it?
+Pooh, the swollen lake has burst it topsy-turvy; and it floats yonder,
+bottom uppermost, a half-furlong of distracted liquid-peat. Whereat his
+Majesty gave a loud laugh, says Bielfeld, [Baron de Bielfeld, _Lettres
+Familieres_ (second edition, a Leide, 1767), i. 31.] and commenced anew.
+The piles now stand firm enough, like the rest of the Earth's crust, and
+carry strong ashlar houses and umbrageous trees for mankind; and trivial
+mankind can walk in clean pumps there, shuddering or sniggering at
+Friedrich Wilhelm, as their humor may be.
+
+No danger of this "Canton-system" of recruitment to the more ingenious
+classes, who could do better than learn drill. Nor, to say truth, does
+the poor clayey peasant suffer from it, according to his apprehensions.
+Often perhaps, could he count profit and loss, he might find himself
+a gainer: the career of honor turns out to be, at least, a career of
+practical Stoicism and Spartanism; useful to any peasant or to any
+prince. Cleanliness, of person and even of mind; fixed rigor of method,
+sobriety, frugality, these are virtues worth acquiring. Sobriety in
+the matter of drink is much attended to here: his Majesty permits no
+distillation of strong-waters in Potsdam, or within so many miles;
+[Fassmann, p. 728.] nor is sale of such allowed, except in the most
+intensely select manner. The soldier's pay is in the highest degree
+exiguous; not above three halfpence a day, for a common foot-soldier,
+in addition to what rations he has:--but it is found adequate to its
+purpose, too; supports the soldier in sound health, vigorously fit for
+his work; into which points his Majesty looks with his own eyes, and
+will admit no dubiety. Often, too, if not already OFTENEST (as it
+ultimately grew to be), the peasant-soldier gets home for many months of
+the year, a soldier-ploughman; and labors for his living in the old way.
+His Captain (it is one of the Captain's perquisites, who is generally a
+veteran of fifty, with a long Spartan training, before he gets so high)
+pockets the pay of all these furloughs, supernumerary to the real work
+of the regiment;--and has certain important furnishings to yield in
+return.
+
+At any rate, enrolment, in time of peace, cannot fall on many: three or
+four recruits in the year, to replace vacancies, will carry the Canton
+through its crisis. For we are to note withal, the third part of every
+regiment can, and should by rule, consist of "foreigners,"--men not born
+Prussians. These are generally men levied in the Imperial Free-towns;
+"in the REICH" or Empire, as they term it; that is to say, or is mainly
+to say, in the countries of Germany that are not Austrian or Prussian.
+For this foreign third-part too, the recruits must be got; excuses
+not admissible for Captain or Colonel; nothing but recruits of the due
+inches will do. Captain and Colonel (supporting their enterprise on
+frugal adequate "perquisites," hinted of above) have to be on the
+outlook; vigilantly, eagerly; and must contrive to get them. Nay, we can
+take supernumerary recruits; and have in fact always on hand, attached
+to each regiment, a stock of such. Any number of recruits, that stand
+well on their legs, are welcome; and for a tall man there is joy in
+Potsdam, almost as if he were a wise man or a good man.
+
+The consequence is, all countries, especially all German countries, are
+infested with a new species of predatory two-legged animals: Prussian
+recruiters. They glide about, under disguise if necessary; lynx-eyed,
+eager almost as the Jesuit hounds are; not hunting the souls of men, as
+the spiritual Jesuits do, but their bodies in a merciless carnivorous
+manner. Better not to be too tall, in any country, at present! Irish
+Kirkman could not be protected by the aegis of the British Constitution
+itself. In general, however, the Prussian recruiter, on British ground,
+reports, That the people are too well off, that there is little to be
+done in those parts. A tall British sailor, if we pick him up
+strolling about Memel or the Baltic ports, is inexorably claimed by the
+Diplomatists; no business do-able till after restoration of him; and
+he proves a mere loss to us. [Despatches in the State-Paper Office.]
+Germany, Holland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, these are the fruitful
+fields for us, and there we do hunt with some vigor.
+
+For example, in the town of Julich there lived and worked a tall young
+carpenter: one day a well-dressed positive-looking gentleman ("Baron von
+Hompesch," the records name him) enters the shop; wants "a stout chest,
+with lock on it, for household purposes; must be of such and such
+dimensions, six feet six in length especially, and that is an
+indispensable point,--in fact it will be longer than yourself, I think,
+Herr Zimmermann: what is the cost; when can it be ready?" Cost, time,
+and the rest are settled. "A right stout chest, then; and see you don't
+forget the size; if too short, it will be of no use to me: mind;"--"JA
+WOHL! GEWISS!" And the positive-looking, well-clad gentleman goes his
+ways. At the appointed day he reappears; the chest is ready;--we hope,
+an unexceptionable article? "Too short, as I dreaded!" says the positive
+gentleman. "Nay, your honor," says the carpenter, "I am certain it is
+six feet six!" and takes out his foot-rule.--"Pshaw, it was to be longer
+than yourself." "Well, it is."--"No it isn't!" The carpenter, to end the
+matter, gets into his chest; and will convince any and all mortals. No
+sooner is he in, rightly flat, than the positive gentleman, a Prussian
+recruiting officer in disguise, slams down the lid upon him; locks it;
+whistles in three stout fellows, who pick up the chest, gravely walk
+through the streets with it, open it in a safe place; and find-horrible
+to relate--the poor carpenter dead; choked by want of air in this
+frightful middle-passage of his. [Forster, ii. 305, 306; Pollnitz, ii.
+518, 519.] Name of the Town is given, Julich as above; date not. And if
+the thing had been only a popular Myth, is it not a significant one?
+But it is too true; the tall carpenter lay dead, and Hompesch got
+"imprisoned for life" by the business.
+
+Burgermeisters of small towns have been carried off; in one case, "a
+rich merchant in Magdeburg," whom it cost a large sum to get free
+again. [Stenzel, iii. 356.] Prussian recruiters hover about barracks,
+parade-grounds, in Foreign Countries; and if they see a tall soldier
+(the Dutch have had instances, and are indignant at them), will
+persuade him to desert,--to make for the country where soldier-merit is
+understood, and a tall fellow of parts will get his pair of colors in
+no-time.
+
+But the highest stretch of their art was probably that done on
+the Austrian Ambassador,--tall Herr von Bentenrieder; tallest of
+Diplomatists; whom Fassmann, till the Fair of St. Germain, had
+considered the tallest of men. Bentenrieder was on his road as Kaiser's
+Ambassador to George I., in those Congress-of-Cambrai times; serenely
+journeying on; when, near by Halberstadt, his carriage broke. Carriage
+takes some time in mending; the tall Diplomatic Herr walks on, will
+stretch his long legs, catch a glimpse of the Town withal, till they get
+it ready again. And now, at some Guard-house of the place, a Prussian
+Officer inquires, not too reverently of a nobleman without carriage,
+"Who are you?" "Well," answered he smiling, "I am BOTSCHAFTER
+(Message-bearer) from his Imperial Majesty. And who may you be that
+ask?"--"To the Guard-house with us!" Whither he is marched accordingly.
+"Kaiser's messenger, why not?" Being a most tall handsome man, this
+Kaiser's BOTSCHAFTER, striding along on foot here, the Guard-house
+Officials have decided to keep him, to teach him Prussian
+drill-exercise;--and are thrown into a singular quandary, when his
+valets and suite come up, full of alarm dissolving into joy, and call
+him "Excellenz!" [Pollnitz, ii. 207-209.]
+
+Tall Herr von Bentenrieder accepted the prostrate apology of these
+Guard-house Officials. But he naturally spoke of the matter to George
+I.; whose patience, often fretted by complaints on that head, seems to
+have taken fire at this transcendent instance of Prussian insolency. In
+consequence of this adventure, he commenced, says Pollnitz, a system
+of decisive measures; of reprisals even, and of altogether peremptory,
+minatory procedures, to clear Hanover of this nuisance; and to make it
+cease, in very fact, and not in promise and profession merely.
+These were the first rubs Queen Sophie met with, in pushing on the
+Double-Marriage; and sore rubs they were, though she at last got over
+them. Coming on the back of that fine Charlottenburg Visit, almost
+within year and day, and directly in the teeth of such friendly aspects
+and prospects, this conduct on the part of his Britannic Majesty much
+grieved and angered Friedrich Wilhelm; and in fact involved him in
+considerable practical troubles.
+
+For it was the signal of a similar set of loud complaints, and menacing
+remonstrances (with little twinges of fulfilment here and there) from
+all quarters of Germany; a tempest of trouble and public indignation
+rising everywhere, and raining in upon Friedrich Wilhelm and this
+unfortunate Hobby of his. No riding of one's poor Hobby in peace
+henceforth. Friedrich Wilhelm always answered, what was only
+superficially the fact, That HE knew nothing of these violences and acts
+of ill-neighborship; he, a just King, was sorrier than any man to hear
+of them; and would give immediate order that they should end. But they
+always went on again, much the same; and never did end. I am sorry
+a just King, led astray by his Hobby, answers thus what is only
+superficially the fact. But it seems he cannot help it: his Hobby is too
+strong for him; regardless of curb and bridle in this instance. Let us
+pity a man of genius, mounted on so ungovernable a Hobby; leaping
+the barriers, in spite of his best resolutions. Perhaps the poetic
+temperament is more liable to such morbid biases, influxes of
+imaginative crotchet, and mere folly that cannot be cured? Friedrich
+Wilhelm never would or could dismount from his Hobby: but he rode
+him under much sorrow henceforth; under showers of anger and
+ridicule;--contumelious words and procedures, as it were SAXA ET FAECES,
+battering round him, to a heavy extent; the rider a victim of Tragedy
+and Farce both at once.
+
+
+
+
+QUEEN SOPHIE'S TROUBLES: GRUMKOW WITH THE OLD DESSAUER, AND GRUMKOW
+WITHOUT HIM.
+
+Queen Sophie had, by delicate management, got over those first rubs, aud
+arrived at a Treaty of Hanover, and clear ground again; far worse rubs
+lay ahead; but smooth travelling, towards such a goal, was not possible
+for this Queen. Poor Lady, her Court, as we discern from Wilhelmina
+and the Books, is a sad welter of intrigues, suspicions; of treacherous
+chambermaids, head-valets, pickthank scouts of official gentlemen and
+others striving to supplant one another. Satan's Invisible World very
+busy against Queen Sophie! Under any terms, much more under those of the
+Double-Marriage, her place in a kindly but suspicious Husband's favor
+was difficult to maintain. Restless aspirants, climbing this way or
+that, by ladder-steps discoverable in this abstruse element, are never
+wanting, and have the due eavesdropping satellites, now here, now there.
+Queen Sophie and her party have to walk warily, as if among precipices
+and pitfalls. Of all which wide welter of extinct contemptibilities,
+then and there so important, here and now become minus quantities, we
+again notice the existence, but can undertake no study or specification
+whatever. Two Incidents, the latter of them dating near the point where
+we now are, will sufficiently instruct the reader what a welter this
+was, in which Queen Sophie and her bright little Son, the new Major of
+the Potsdam Giants, had to pass their existence.
+
+Incident First fell out some six years ago or more,--in 1719, year of
+the Heidelberg Protestants, of Clement the Forger, when his Majesty
+"slept for weeks with a pistol under his pillow," and had other
+troubles. His Majesty, on one of his journeys, which were always many,
+was taken suddenly ill at Brandenburg, that year: so violently ill, that
+thinking himself about to die, he sent for his good Queen, and made a
+Will appointing her Regent in case of his decease. His Majesty quite
+recovered before long. But Grumkow and the old Dessauer, main aspirants;
+getting wind of this Will, and hunting out the truth of it,--what a
+puddling of the waters these two made in consequence; stirring up mire
+and dirt round the good Queen, finding she had been preferred to them!
+[Wilhelmina, i. 26, 29.] Nay Wilhelmina, in her wild way, believes they
+had, not long after, planned to "fire a Theatre" about the King, one
+afternoon, in Berlin City, and take his life, thereby securing for
+themselves such benefit in prospect as there might be! Not a doubt of
+it, thinks Wilhelmina: "The young Margraf, [Born 1700 (see vol. v. p.
+393.)] our precious Cousin, of Schwedt, is not he Sister's-son of that
+Old Dessauer? Grandson of the Great Elector, even as Papa is. Papa once
+killed (and our poor Crown-Prince also made away with),--that young
+Margraf, and his blue Fox-tiger of an Uncle over him, is King in
+Prussia! Obviously they meant to burn that Theatre, and kill Papa!" This
+is Wilhelmina's distracted belief; as, doubtless, it was her Mother's
+on the day in question: a jealous, much-suffering, transcendently
+exasperated Mother, as we see.
+
+Incident Second shows us those, two rough Gentlemen fallen out of
+partnership, into open quarrel and even duel. "Duel at the Copenick
+Gate," much noised of in the dull old Prussian Books,--though always in
+a reserved manner; not even the DATE, as if that were dangerous, being
+clearly given! It came in the wake of that Hanover Treaty, as is now
+guessed; the two having taken opposite sides on that measure, and got
+provoked into ripping up old sores in general. Dessau was AGAINST King
+George and the Treaty, it appears; having his reasons, family-reasons
+of old standing: Grumkow, a bribable gentleman, was FOR,--having also
+perhaps his reasons. Enough, it came to altercations, objurgations
+between the two; which rose ever higher,--rose at length to
+wager-of-battle. Indignant challenge on the part of the Old Dessauer;
+which, however, Grumkow, not regarded as a BARESARK in the fighting way,
+regrets that his Christian principles do not, forsooth, allow him to
+accept. The King is appealed to; the King, being himself, though an
+orthodox Christian, yet a still more orthodox Soldier, decides That,
+on the whole, General Grumkow cannot but accept this challenge from the
+Field-marshal Prince of Dessau.
+
+Dessau is on the field, at the Copenick Gate, accordingly,--late-autumn
+afternoon (I calculate) of the year 1725;--waits patiently till Grumkow
+make his appearance. Grumkow, with a chosen second, does at last appear;
+advances pensively with slow steps. Gunpowder Dessau, black as a silent
+thunder-cloud, draws his sword: and Grumkow--does not draw his; presents
+it undrawn, with unconditional submission and apology: "Slay me, if
+you like, old Friend, whom I have injured!" Whereat Dessau, uttering
+no word, uttering only some contemptuous snort, turns his back on the
+phenomenon; mounts his horse and rides home. [Pollnitz, ii. 212, 214.]
+A divided man from this Grumkow henceforth. The Prince waited on her
+Majesty; signified his sorrow for past estrangements; his great wish now
+to help her, but his total inability, being ousted by Grumkow: We are
+for Halle, Madam, where our Regiment is; there let us serve his Majesty,
+since we cannot here! [Wilhelmina, i. 90, 93.]--And in fact the Old
+Dessauer lives mostly there in time coming; sunk inarticulate in tactics
+of a truly deep nature, not stranding on politics of a shallow;--a man
+still memorable in the mythic traditions of that place. Better to drill
+men to perfection, and invent iron ramrods, against the day they shall
+be needed, than go jostling, on such terms, with cattle of the Grumkow
+kind! And thus, we perceive, Grumkow is in, and the Old Dessauer
+out; and there has been "a change of Ministry," change of
+"Majesty's-Advisers," brought about;--may the Advice going be wiser now!
+
+What the young Crown-Prince did, said, thought, in such environment,
+of backstairs diplomacies, female sighs and aspirations, Grumkow duels,
+drillings in the Giant Regiment, is not specified for us in the smallest
+particular, in the extensive rubbish-books that have been written about
+him. Ours is, to indicate that such environment was: how a lively soul,
+acted on by it, did not fail to react, chameleon-like taking color
+from it, and contrariwise taking color against it, must be left to the
+reader's imagination--One thing we have gathered and will not forget,
+That the Old Dessauer is out, and Grumkow in, that the rugged Son
+of Gunpowder, drilling men henceforth at Halle, and in a dumb
+way meditating tactics as few ever did, has no share in the foul
+enchantments that now supervene at court.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI. -- ORDNANCE-MASTER SECKENDORF CROSSES THE PALACE ESPLANADE.
+
+The Kaiser's terror and embarrassment at the conclusion of the Hanover
+Treaty, as we saw, were extreme. War possible or likely; and nothing but
+the termagant caprices of Elizabeth Farnese to depend on: no cash from
+the Sea-Powers; only cannonshot, invasion and hostility, from their cash
+and them: What is to be done? To "caress the pride of Spain;" to keep
+alive the hopes, in that quarter, of marrying their Don Carlos, the
+supplementary Infant, to our eldest Archduchess; which indeed has
+set the Sea-Powers dreadfully on fire, but which does leave Parma and
+Piacenza quiet for the present, and makes the Pragmatic Sanction too an
+affair of Spain's own: this is one resource, though a poor one, and a
+dangerous. Another is, to make alliance with Russia, by well flattering
+the poor little brown Czarina there: but is not that a still poorer? And
+what third is there!--
+
+There is a third worth both the others, could it be got done: To detach
+Friedrich Wilhelm from those dangerous Hanover Confederates, and bring
+him gently over to ourselves. He has an army of 60,000, in perfect
+equipment, and money to maintain them so. Against us or for us,--60,000
+PLUS or 60,000 MINUS;--that will mean 120,000 fighting men; a most
+weighty item in any field there is like to be. If it lie in the power
+of human art, let us gain this wild irritated King of Prussia. Dare
+any henchman of ours venture to go, with honey-cakes, with pattings and
+cajoleries, and slip the imperial muzzle well round the snout of that
+rugged ursine animal? An iracund bear, of dangerous proportions, and
+justly irritated against us at present? Our experienced FELDZEUGMEISTER,
+Ordnance-Master and Diplomatist, Graf von Seckendorf, a conscientious
+Protestant, and the cunningest of men, able to lie to all lengths,--dare
+he try it? He has fought in all quarters of the world; and lied in all,
+where needful; and saved money in all: he will try it, and will succeed
+in it too! [Pollnitz, ii. 235; Stenzel, iii. 544; Forster, ii. 59, iii.
+235, 239.]
+
+The Second Act, therefore, of this foolish World-Drama of the
+Double-Marriage opens,--on the 11th May, 1726, towards sunset, in the
+TABAGIE of the Berlin Palace, as we gather from laborious comparison of
+windy Pollnitz with other indistinct witnesses of a dreary nature,--in
+the following manner:--
+
+Prussian Majesty sits smoking at the window; nothing particular going
+on. A square-built shortish steel-gray Gentleman, of military cut, past
+fifty, is strolling over the SCHLOSSPLATZ (spacious Square in front of
+the Palace), conspicuous amid the sparse populations there; pensively
+recreating himself, in the yellow sunlight and long shadows, as after a
+day's hard labor or travel. "Who is that?" inquires Friedrich Wilhelm,
+suspending his tobacco. Grumkow answers cautiously, after survey: He
+thinks it must be Ordnance-Master Seckendorf; who was with him
+to-day; passing on rapidly towards Denmark, on business that will not
+wait.--"Experienced Feldzeugmeister Graf von Seckendorf, whom we stand
+in correspondence with, of late, and were expecting about this time?
+Whom we have known at the Siege of Stralsund, nay ever since the
+Marlborough times and the Siege of Menin, in war and peace; and have
+always reckoned a solid reasonable man and soldier: Why has he not
+come to us?"--"Your Majesty," confesses Grumkow, "his business is so
+pressing! Business in Denmark will not wait. Seckendorf owned he
+had come slightly round, in his eagerness to see our grand Review at
+Tempelhof the day after to-morrow: What soldier would omit the sight (so
+he was pleased to intimate) of soldiering carried to the non-plus-ultra?
+But he hoped to do it quite incognito, among the general public;--and
+then to be at the gallop again: not able to have the honor of paying
+his court at this time."--"Court? NARREN-POSSEN (Nonsense)!" answers
+Friedrich Wilhelm,--and opening the window, beckons Seckendorf up, with
+his own royal head and hand. The conversation of a man who had rational
+sense, and could tell him anything, were it only news af foreign parts
+in a rational manner, was always welcome to Friedrich Wilhelm.
+
+And so Seckendorf, how can he help it, is installed in the Tabagie;
+glides into pleasant conversation there. A captivating talker; solid for
+religion, for the rights of Germany against intrusive French and others:
+such insight, orthodoxy, sense and ingenuity; pleasant to hear; and all
+with the due quantity of oil, though he "both snuffles and lisps;" and
+has privately, in case of need, a capacity of lying,--for he curiously
+distils you any lie, in his religious alembics, till it become tolerable
+to his conscience, or even palatable, as elixirs are;--capacity of
+double-distilled lying probably the greatest of his day.--Seckendorf
+assists at the grand Review, 13th May, 1726; witnesses with unfeigned
+admiration the non-plus-ultra of manoeuvring, and, in fact, the general
+management, military and other, of this admirable King. [Pollnitz, ii.
+235; Fassmann, pp. 367, 368.] Seckendorf, no question of it, will do
+his Denmark business swiftly, then, since your Majesty is pleased so to
+wish. Seckendorf, sure enough, will return swiftly to such a King, whose
+familiar company, vouchsafed him in this noble manner, he likes,--oh,
+how he likes it!
+
+In a week or two, Seckendorf is back to Berlin; attends his Majesty
+on the annual Military Tour through Preussen; attends him everywhere,
+becoming quite a necessary of life to his Majesty; and does not go away
+at all. Seckendorf's business, if his Majesty knew it, will not lead
+him "away;" but lies here on this spot; and is now going on; the
+magic-apparatus, Grumkow the mainspring of it, getting all into gear!
+Grumkow was once clear for King George and the Hanover Treaty, having
+his reasons then; but now he has other reasons, and is clear against
+those foreign connections. "Hm, hah--Yes, my estimable, justly powerful
+Herr von Grumkow, here is a little Pension of 1,600 ducats (only 500
+pounds as yet), which the Imperial Majesty, thinking of the service
+you may do Prussia and Germany and him, graciously commands me to
+present;--only 500 pounds by the year as yet; but there shall be no lack
+of money if we prosper!" [Forster, iii. 233, 232; see also iv. 172, 121,
+157, &c.]
+
+And so there are now two Black-Artists, of the first quality, busy on
+the unconscious Friedrich Wilhelm; and Seckendorf, for the next seven
+years, will stick to Friedrich Wilhelm like his shadow; and fascinate
+his whole existence and him, as few wizards could have done. Friedrich
+Wilhelm, like St. Paul in Melita, warming his innocent hands at the
+fire of dry branches here kindled for him,--that miracle of a venomous
+serpent is this that has fixed itself upon his finger? To Friedrich
+Wilhelm's enchanted sense it seems a bird-of-paradise, trustfully
+perching there; but it is of the whip-snake kind, or a worse; and will
+stick to him tragically, if also comically, for years to come. The
+world has seen the comedy of it, and has howled scornful laughter upon
+Friedrich Wilhelm for it: but there is a tragic side, not so well
+seen into, where tears are due to the poor King; and to certain others
+horsewhips, and almost gallows-ropes, are due!--Yes, had Seckendorf and
+Grumkow both been well hanged, at this stage of the affair, whereby
+the affair might have soon ended on fair terms, it had been welcome to
+mankind; welcome surely to the present Editor; for one; such a saving to
+him, of time wasted, of disgust endured! And indeed it is a solacement
+he has often longed for, in these dreary operations of his. But the
+Fates appointed otherwise; we have all to accept our Fate!--
+
+Grumkow is sworn to Imperial orthodoxy, then,--probably the vulpine MIND
+(so to term it) went always rather that way, and only his interest
+the other;--Grumkow is well bribed, supplied for bribing others where
+needful; stands orthodox now, under peril of his very head. All
+things have been got distilled into the palatable state, spiritual and
+economic, for oneself and one's grand Trojan-Horse of a Grumkow; and the
+adventure proceeds apace. Seckendorf sits nightly in the TABAGIE (a
+kind of "Smoking Parliament," as we shall see anon); attends on all
+promenades and journeys: one of the wisest heads, and so pleasant in
+discourse, he is grown indispensable, and a necessary of life to us.
+Seckendorf's Biographer computes, "he must have ridden, in those seven
+years, continually attending his Majesty, above 5,000 German miles,"
+[Anonymous (Seckendorf's Grand-Nephew) _Versuch einer Lebensbeschreibung
+des Feldmarschalls Grafen von Seckendorf_ (Leipzig, 1792, 1794), i.
+6.]--that is 25,000 English miles; or a trifle more than the length of
+the Terrestrial Equator.
+
+In a month or two, [13th August, 1726 (Preuss, i. 37).]
+Seckendorf--since Majesty vouchsafes to honor us by wishing
+it--contrives to get nominated Kaiser's Minister at Berlin: unlimited
+prospects of Tabagie, and good talk, now opening on Majesty. And
+impartial Grumkow, in Tabagie or wherever we are, cannot but admit, now
+and then, that the Excellenz Herr Graf Ordnance-Master has a deal of
+reason in what he says about Foreign Politics, about intrusive French
+and other points. "Hm, Na," muses Friedrich Wilhelm to himself, "if the
+Kaiser had not been so lofty on us in that Heidelberg-Protestant affair,
+in the Ritter-Dienst business, in those damned 'recruiting' brabbles;
+always a very high-sniffing surly Kaiser to us!" For in fact the Kaiser
+has, all along, used Friedrich Wilhelm bitterly ill; and contemplates
+no better usage of him, except in show. Usage? thinks the Kaiser: A big
+Prussian piece of Cannon, whom we wish to enchant over to us! Did LAZY
+PEG complain of her "usage"?--So that the Excellenz and Grumkow have a
+heavy problem of it; were they not so diligent, and the Cannon itself
+well disposed. "Those BLITZ FRANZOSEN (blasted French)!" growls
+Friedrich Wilhelm sometimes, in the Tobacco-Parliament: [Forster, ii.
+12, &c.] for he hates the French, and would fain love his Kaiser; being
+German to the bone, and of right loyal heart, though counted only a
+piece of cannon by some. For one thing, his Prussian Majesty declines
+signing that Treaty of Hanover a second time: now when the Dutch accede
+to it, after almost a year's trouble with them, the Prussian Ambassador,
+singular to observe, "has no orders to sign;" leaves the English with
+their Hollanders and Blitz Franzosen to sign by themselves, this time.
+[9th August, 1726. (Boyer, _The Political State of Great Rrilain,_ a
+monthly periodical, vol. xxxii. p. 77, which is the number for July,
+1726.)] "We will wait, we will wait!" thinks his Prussian Majesty:--"Who
+knows?"
+
+"But then Julich and Berg!" urges he always; "Britannic Majesty and
+the Blitz Franzosen were to secure me the reversion there. That was
+the essential point!"--For this too Excellenz has a remedy; works out
+gradually a remedy from headquarters, the amiable dexterous man: "Kaiser
+will do the like, your Majesty; Kaiser himself will secure it you!"--In
+brief, some three months after Seckendorf's instalment as Kaiser's
+Minister, not yet five months since his appearance in the Schlossplatz
+that May evening,--it is now Hunting-season, and we are at Wusterhausen;
+Majesty, his two Black-Artists and the proper satellites on both sides
+all there,--a new and opposite Treaty, in extreme privacy, on the 12th
+of October, 1726, is signed at that sequestered Hunting-Schloss: "Treaty
+of Wusterhausen" so called; which was once very famous and mysterious,
+and caused many wigs to wag. Wigs to wag, in those days especially, when
+knowledge of it was first had; the rather as only half knowledge could
+be had of it;--or can, mourns Dryasdust, who has still difficulties
+about some "secret articles" in the Document. [Buchholz, i. 94 n.]
+Courage, my friend; they are now of no importance to any creature.
+
+The essential purport of this Treaty, [Given IN EXTENSO (without the
+secret articles) in Forster, iv. 159-166.] legible to all eyes, is,
+"That Friedrich Wilhelm silently drops the Hanover Treaty and Blitz
+Franzosen; and explicitly steps over to the Kaiser's side; stipulates to
+assist the Kaiser with so many thousand, if attacked in Germany by any
+Blitz Franzose or intrusive Foreigner whatever. In return for which, the
+Kaiser, besides assisting Prussia in the like case with a like quantity
+of thousands, engages, in circuitous chancery language, To be helpful,
+and humanly speaking effectual, in that grand matter of Julich and
+Berg;--somewhat in the following strain: 'To our Imperial mind it does
+appear the King of Prussia has manifest right to the succession in
+Julich and Berg; right grounded on express ERBVERGLEICH of 1624, not to
+speak of Deeds subsequent: the Imperial mind, as supreme judge of
+such matters in the Reich, will not fail to decide this Cause soon and
+justly, should it come to that. But we hope it may take a still better
+course: for the Imperial mind will straightway set about persuading
+Kur-Pfalz to comply peaceably; and even undertakes to have something
+done, that way, before six months pass.'" [Art. v. in Forster, ubi
+supra.]
+
+Humanly speaking, surely the Imperial mind will be effectual in the
+Julich and Berg matter. But it was very necessary to use circuitous
+chancery language,--inasmuch as the Imperial mind, desirous also to
+secure Kur-Pfalz's help in this sore crisis, had, about three months
+ago, [Treaty with Kur-Pfalz, 16th August, 1726 (Forster, ii. 71).]
+expressly engaged to Kur-Pfalz, That Julich and Berg should NOT go to
+Friedrich Wilhelm in terms of the old Deed, but to Kur-Pfalz's Cousins
+of Sulzbach, whom the old gentleman (in spite of Deeds) was obstinate
+to prefer! There is no doubt about that fact, about that self-devouring
+pair of facts. To such straits is a Kaiser driven when he gets deep into
+spectre-hunting.
+
+This is the once famous, now forgotten, "Treaty of Wusterhausen, 12th
+October, 1726;" which proved so consolatory to the Kaiser in that dread
+crisis of his Spectre-Hunt; and the effects of which are very visible
+in this History, if nowhere else. It caught up the Prussian-English
+Double-Marriage; launched it into the huge tide of Imperial Spectre
+Politics, into the awful swaggings and swayings of the Terrestrial LIBRA
+in general; and nearly broke the heart of several Royal persons; of a
+memorable Crown-Prince, among others. Which last is now, pretty much,
+its sole claim to be ever mentioned again by mankind. As there was
+no performance, nor an intention of any, in that Julich-Berg matter,
+Excellenz Seckendorf had the task henceforth of keeping, by art-magic
+or the PRETERnatural method,--that is, by mere help of Grumkow and the
+Devil,--his Prussian Majesty steady to the Kaiser nevertheless.
+Always well divided from the English especially. Which the Excellency
+Seckendorf managed to do. For six or seven years coming; or, in fact,
+till these Spectre-chasings ended, or ran else-whither for consummation.
+Steady always, jealous of the English; sometimes nearly mad, but always
+ready as a primed cannon: so Friedrich Wilhelm was accordingly managed
+to be kept;--his own Household gone almost into delirium; he himself
+looking out, with loyally fierce survey, for any Anti-Kaiser War: "When
+do we go off, then?"--though none ever came. And indeed nothing came;
+and except those torments to young Friedrich and others, it was all
+Nothing. One of the strangest pieces of Black-Art ever done.
+
+Excellenz Seckendorf, whom Friedrich Wilhelm so loves, is by no means a
+beautiful man; far the reverse. Bodily,--and the spirit corresponds,--a
+stiff-backed, petrified, stony, inscrutable-looking, and most
+unbeautiful old Intriguer. Portraits of him, which are frequent, tell
+all one story. The brow puckered together, in a wide web of wrinkles
+from each temple, as if it meant to hide the bad pair of eyes, which
+look suspicion; inquiry, apprehension, habit of double-distilled
+mendacity; the indeterminate projecting chin, with its thick, chapped
+under-lip, is shaken out, or shoved out, in mill-hopper fashion,--as if
+to swallow anything there may be, spoken thing or other, and grind it
+to profitable meal for itself. Spiritually he was an old Soldier let for
+hire; an old Intriguer, Liar, Fighter, what you like. What we may call
+a human Soul standing like a hackney-coach, this half-century past, with
+head, tongue, heart, conscience, at the hest of a discerning public and
+its shilling.
+
+There is considerable faculty, a certain stiff-necked strength in the
+old fellow; in fact, nature had been rather kind to him; and certainly
+his Uncle and Guardian--the distinguished Seckendorf who did the
+HISTORIA LUTHERANISMI, a RITTER, and man of good mark, in Ernst THE
+PIOUS of Saxe-Gotha's time--took pains about his education. But Nature's
+gifts have not prospered with him: how could they, in that hackney-coach
+way of life? Considerable gifts, we say; shrunk into a strange
+bankruptcy in the development of them. A stiff-backed, close-fisted old
+gentleman, with mill-hopper chin,--with puckery much-inquiring eyes,
+which have never discovered any noble path for him in this world. He is
+a strictly orthodox Protestant; zealous about external points of moral
+conduct; yet scruples not, for the Kaiser's shilling, to lie with energy
+to all lengths; and fight, according to the Reichs-Hofrath code, for any
+god or man. He is gone mostly to avarice, in these mature years; all
+his various strengths turned into strength of grasping. He is now
+fifty-four; a man public in the world, especially since he became the
+Kaiser's man: but he has served various masters, in various capacities,
+and been in many wars;--and for the next thirty years we shall still
+occasionally meet him, seldom to our advantage.
+
+He comes from Anspach originally; and has kindred Seckendorfs in office
+there, old Ritters in that Country. He inherited a handsome castle and
+estate, Meuselwitz, near Altenburg in the Thuringen region, from that
+Uncle, Ernst of Saxe-Gotha's man, whom we spoke of; and has otherwise
+gained wealth; all which he holds like a vice. Once, at Meuselwitz, they
+say, he and some young secretary, of a smartish turn, sat working or
+conversing, in a large room with only one candle to illuminate it: the
+secretary, snuffing the candle, snuffed it out: "Pshaw," said Seckendorf
+impatiently, "where did you learn to handle snuffers?" "Excellenz, in
+a place where there were two lights kept!" replied the other. [_
+Sechendorje Leben_ (already cited), i. 4.]--For the rest, he has a good
+old Wife at Meuselwitz, who is now old, and had never any children;
+who loves him much, and is much loved by him, it would appear: this is
+really the best fact I ever knew of him,--poor bankrupt creature;
+gone all to spiritual rheumatism, to strict orthodoxy, with unlimited
+mendacity; and avarice as the general outcome! Stiff-backed,
+close-fisted strength, all grown wooden or stony; yet some little well
+of human Sympathy does lie far in the interior: one wishes, after all
+(since he could not be got hanged in time for us), good days to his poor
+old Wife and him! He both lisps and snuffles, as was mentioned; writes
+cunningly acres of despatches to Prince Eugene; never swears, though a
+military man, except on great occasions one oath, JARNI-BLEU,--which is
+perhaps some flash-note version of CHAIR-DE-DIEU, like PARBLEU, 'Zounds
+and the rest of them, which the Devil cannot prosecute you for; whereby
+an economic man has the pleasure of swearing on cheap terms.
+
+Herr Pollnitz's account of Seckendorf is unusually emphatic; babbling
+Pollnitz rises into a strain of pulpit eloquence, inspired by
+indignation, on this topic: "He affected German downrightness, to which
+he was a stranger; and followed, under a deceitful show of piety, all
+the principles of Machiavel. With the most sordid love of money he
+combined boorish manners. Lies [of the distilled kind chiefly] had so
+become a habit with him, that he had altogether lost notion of employing
+truth in speech. It was the soul of a usurer, inhabiting now the body of
+a war-captain, now transmigrating into that of a huckster. False oaths,
+and the abominablest basenesses, cost him nothing, so his object might
+be reached. He was miserly with his own, but lavish with his Master's
+money; daily he gave most striking proofs of both these habitudes. And
+this was the man whom we saw, for a space of time, at the head of the
+Kaiser's Armies, and at the helm of the State and of the German Empire,"
+[Pollnitz, ii. 238.]--having done the Prussian affair so well.
+
+This cunning old Gentleman, to date from the autumn of 1726, may be said
+to have taken possession of Friedrich Wilhelm; to have gone into him,
+Grumkow and he, as two devils would have done in the old miraculous
+times: and, in many senses, it was they, not the nominal proprietor,
+that lived Friedrich Wilhelm's life. For the next seven years, a figure
+went about, not doubting it was Friedrich Wilhelm; but it was in reality
+Seckendorf-and-Grumkow much more. These two, conjurer and his man,
+both invisible, have caught their royal wild Bear; got a rope round his
+muzzle;--and so dance him about; now terrifying, now exhilarating all
+the market by the pranks he plays! Grumkow, a very Machiavel after his
+sort, knew the nature of the royal animal as no other did. Grumkow,
+purchased by his Pension of 500 pounds, is dog-cheap at the Money, as
+Seckendorf often urges at Vienna, Is he not? And they add a touch of
+extraordinary gift now and then, 40,000 florins (4,000 pounds) on one
+occasion: [In 1732: Forster, iii. 232.] for "Grumkow DIENET EHRLICH
+(serves honorably)," urges Seckendorf; and again, "If anybody deserves
+favor [GNADE, meaning extra pay], it is this gentleman;"--WAHRLICH!
+Purchased Grumkow has ample money at command, to purchase other people
+needed; and does purchase; so that all things and persons can be
+falsified and enchanted, as need is. By and by it has got so far,
+that Friedrich Wilhelm's Ambassador at London maintains a
+cipher-correspondence with Grumkow; and writes to Friedrich Wilhelm,
+not what is passing in city or court there, but what Grumkow wishes
+Friedrich Wilhelm to think is passing.
+
+Of insinuations, by assent or contradiction, potent if you know the
+nature of the beast; of these we need not speak. Tabaks-Collegium has
+become a workshop:--human nature can fancy it! Nay human nature can
+still read it in the British State-Paper Office, to boundless stupendous
+extent;--but ought mostly to suppress it when read.
+
+This is a very strange part of Friedrich Wilhelm's history; and has
+caused much wonder in the world: Wilhelmina's Book rather aggravating
+than assuaging that feeling, on the part of intelligent readers. A Book
+written long afterwards, from her recollections, from her own oblique
+point of view; in a beautifully shrill humor; running, not unnaturally,
+into confused exaggerations and distortions of all kinds. Not
+mendaciously written anywhere, yet erroneously everywhere. Wilhelmina
+had no knowledge of the magical machinery that was at work: she
+vaguely suspects Grumkow and Seckendorf; but does not guess, in the mad
+explosions of Papa, that two devils have got into Papa, and are
+doing the mischief. Trusting to memory alone, she misdates, mistakes,
+misplaces; jumbles all things topsy-turvy;--giving, on the whole, an
+image of affairs which is altogether oblique, dislocated, exaggerative;
+and which, in fine, proves unintelligible, if you try to construe it
+into a fact or thing DONE. Yet her Human Narrative, in that wide waste
+of merely Pedant Maunderings, is of great worth to us. A green tree,
+a leafy grove, better or worse, in the wilderness of dead bones and
+sand,--how welcome! Many other Books have been written on the matter;
+but these to my experience, only darken it more and more. Pull
+Wilhelmina STRAIGHT, the best you can; deduct a twenty-five or sometimes
+even a seventy-five per cent, from the exaggerative portions of her
+statement; you will find her always true, lucid, charmingly human;
+and by far the best authority on this part of her Brother's History.
+State-Papers to some extent have also been printed on the matter; and
+of written State-Papers, here in England and elsewhere, this Editor has,
+had several hundred-weights distilled for him: but except as lights hung
+out over Wilhelmina, nothing yet known, of published or manuscript, can
+be regarded as good for much.
+
+O Heavens, had one but seven-league boots, to get across that
+inane country,--a bottomless whirlpool of dust and cobwebs in many
+places;--where, at any rate, we had so little to do! Elucidating,
+rectifying, painfully contrasting, comparing, let us try to work
+out some conceivable picture of this strange Imperial MUCH ADO ABOUT
+NOTHING; and get our unfortunate Crown-Prince, and our unfortunate
+selves, alive through it.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII. -- TOBACCO-PARLIAMENT.
+
+In these distressing junctures, it may cheer the reader's spirits, and
+will tend to explain for him what is coming, if we glance a little into
+the Friedrich-Wilhelm TABAGIE (TABAKS-COLLEGIUM or Smoking College),
+more worthy to be called Tobacco-Parliament, of which there have already
+been incidental notices. Far too remarkable an Institution of the
+country to be overlooked by us here.
+
+Friedrich Wilhelm, though an absolute Monarch, does not dream of
+governing without Law, still less without Justice, which he knows well
+to be the one basis for him and for all Kings and men. His life-effort,
+prosecuted in a grand, unconscious, unvarying and instinctive way, may
+be defined rather as the effort to find out everywhere in his affairs
+what was justice; to make regulations, laws in conformity with that, and
+to guide himself and his Prussia rigorously by these. Truly he is not
+of constitutional turn; cares little about the wigs and formalities of
+justice, pressing on so fiercely towards the essence and fact of it; he
+has been known to tear asunder the wigs and formalities, in a notably
+impatient manner, when they stood between him and the fact. But Prussia
+has its Laws withal, tolerably abundant, tolerably fixed and supreme:
+and the meanest Prussian man that could find out a definite Law, coming
+athwart Friedrich Wilhelm's wrath, would check Friedrich Wilhelm in
+mid-volley,--or hope with good ground to do it. Hope, we say; for the
+King is in his own and his people's eyes, to some indefinite extent,
+always himself the supreme ultimate Interpreter, and grand living codex,
+of the Laws,--always to some indefinite extent;--and there remains for a
+subject man nothing but the appeal to PHILIP SOBER, in some rash cases!
+On the whole, however, Friedrich Wilhelm is by no means a lawless
+Monarch; nor are his Prussians slaves by any means: they are patient,
+stout-hearted, subject men, with a very considerable quantity of radical
+fire, very well covered in; prevented from idle explosions, bound to
+a respectful demeanor, and especially to hold their tongues as much as
+possible.
+
+Friedrich Wilhelm has not the least shadow of a Constitutional
+Parliament, nor even a Privy-Council, as we understand it; his Ministers
+being in general mere Clerks to register and execute what he
+had otherwise resolved upon: but he had his TABAKS-COLLEGIUM,
+Tobacco-College, Smoking Congress, TABAGIE, which has made so much noise
+in the world, and which, in a rough natural way: affords him the uses
+of a Parliament, on most cheap terms, and without the formidable
+inconveniences attached to that kind of Institution. A Parliament
+reduced to its simplest expression, and, instead of Parliamentary
+eloquence, provided with Dutch clay-pipes and tobacco: so we may define
+this celebrated Tabagie of Friedrich Wilhelm's.
+
+Tabagies were not uncommon among German Sovereigns of that epoch: George
+I. at Hanover had his Smoking-room, and select smoking Party on an
+evening; and even at London, as we noticed, smoked nightly, wetting
+his royal throat with thin beer, in presence of his fat and of his lean
+Mistress, if there were no other company. Tobacco,--introduced by the
+Swedish soldiers in the Thirty-Years War, say some; or even by the
+English soldiers in the Bohemian or Palatinate beginnings of said War,
+say others;--tobacco, once shown them, was enthusiastically adopted by
+the German populations, long in want of such an article; and has done
+important multifarious functions in that country ever since. For truly,
+in Politics, Morality, and all departments of their Practical and
+Speculative affairs, we may trace its influences, good and bad, to this
+day.
+
+Influences generally bad; pacificatory but bad, engaging you in idle
+cloudy dreams;--still worse, promoting composure among the palpably
+chaotic and discomposed; soothing all things into lazy peace; that all
+things may be left to themselves very much, and to the laws of gravity
+and decomposition. Whereby German affairs are come to be greatly
+overgrown with funguses in our Time; and give symptoms of dry and of
+wet rot, wherever handled. George I., we say, had his Tabagie; and
+other German Sovereigns had: but none of them turned it to a Political
+Institution, as Friedrich Wilhelm did. The thrifty man; finding it
+would serve in that capacity withal. He had taken it up as a commonplace
+solace and amusement: it is a reward for doing strenuously the day's
+heavy labors, to wind them up in this manner, in quiet society of
+friendly human faces, into a contemplative smoke-canopy, slowly
+spreading into the realm of sleep and its dreams. Friedrich Wilhelm was
+a man of habitudes; his evening Tabagie became a law of Nature to him,
+constant as the setting of the sun. Favorable circumstances, quietly
+noticed and laid hold of by the thrifty man, developed this simple
+evening arrangement of his into a sort of Smoking Parliament, small
+but powerful, where State-consultations, in a fitful informal way,
+took place; and the weightiest affairs might, by dexterous management,
+cunning insinuation and manoeuvring from those that understood the art
+and the place, he bent this way or that, and ripened towards such issue
+as was desirable.
+
+To ascertain what the true course in regard to this or the other high
+matter will be; what the public will think of it; and, in short, what
+and how the Executive-Royal shall DO therein: this, the essential
+function of a Parliament and Privy-Council, was here, by artless cheap
+methods, under the bidding of mere Nature, multifariously done; mere
+taciturnity and sedative smoke making the most of what natural intellect
+there might be. The substitution of Tobacco-smoke for Parliamentary
+eloquence is, by some, held to be a great improvement. Here is
+Smelfungus's opinion, quaintly expressed, with a smile in it, which
+perhaps is not all of joy:--
+
+"Tobacco-smoke is the one element in which, by our European manners, men
+can sit silent together without embarrassment, and where no man is bound
+to speak one word more than he has actually and veritably got to say.
+Nay, rather every man is admonished and enjoined by the laws of honor,
+and even of personal ease, to stop short of that point; at all events,
+to hold his peace and take to his pipe again, the instant he has spoken
+his meaning, if he chance to have any. The results of which salutary
+practice, if introduced into Constitutional Parliaments, might evidently
+be incalculable. The essence of what little intellect and insight there
+is in that room: we shall or can get nothing more out of any Parliament;
+and sedative, gently soothing, gently clarifying tobacco-smoke (if the
+room were well ventilated, open atop, and the air kept good), with the
+obligation to a MINIMUM of speech, surely gives human intellect and
+insight the best chance they can have. Best chance, instead of the worst
+chance as at present: ah me, ah me, who will reduce fools to silence
+again in any measure? Who will deliver men from this hideous nightmare
+of Stump-Oratory, under which the grandest Nations are choking to a
+nameless death, bleeding (too truly) from mouth and nose and ears, in
+our sad days?"
+
+This Tobacco-College is the Grumkow-and-Seckendorf chief field of
+action. These two gentlemen understand thoroughly the nature of the
+Prussian Tobacco-Parliament; have studied the conditions of it to the
+most intricate cranny: no English Whipper-in or eloquent Premier knows
+his St. Stephen's better, or how to hatch a measure in that dim hot
+element. By hint, by innuendo; by contemplative smoke, speech and
+forbearance to speak; often looking one way and rowing another,--they
+can touch the secret springs, and guide in a surprising manner the big
+dangerous Fireship (for such every State-Parliament is) towards
+the haven they intend for it. Most dexterous Parliament-men
+(Smoke-Parliament); no Walpole, no Dundas, or immortal Pitt, First
+or Second, is cleverer in Parliamentary practice. For their Fireship,
+though smaller than the British, is very dangerous withal. Look at this,
+for instance: Seckendorf, one evening, far contrary to his wont, which
+was prostrate respect in easy forms, and always judicious submission
+of one's own weaker judgment, towards his Majesty,--has got into some
+difficult defence of the Kaiser; defence very difficult, or in reality
+impossible. The cautious man is flustered by the intricacies of his
+position, by his Majesty's indignant counter-volleys, and the
+perilous necessity there is to do the impossible on the spur of the
+instant;--gets into emphasis, answers his Majesty's volcanic fire by
+incipient heat of his own; and, in short, seems in danger of forgetting
+himself, and kindling the Tobacco-Parliament into a mere conflagration.
+That will be an issue for us! And yet who dare interfere? Friedrich
+Wilhelm's words, in high clangorous metallic plangency, and the
+pathos of a lion raised by anger into song, fall hotter and hotter;
+Seckendorf's puckered brow is growing of slate-color; his shelf-lip,
+shuttling violently, lisps and snuffles mere unconciliatory
+matter:--What on earth will become of us?--"Hoom! Boom!" dexterous
+Grumkow has drawn a Humming-top from his pocket, and suddenly sent it
+spinning. There it hums and caracoles, through the bottles and glasses;
+reckless what dangerous breakage and spilth it may occasion. Friedrich
+Wilhelm looked aside to it indignantly. "What is that?" inquired he, in
+metallic tone still high. "Pooh, a toy I bought for the little Prince
+August, your Majesty: am only trying it!" His Majesty understood the
+hint, Seckendorf still better; and a jolly touch of laughter, on both
+sides, brought the matter back into the safe tobacco-clouds again.
+[Forster, ii. 110.]
+
+This Smoking Parliament or TABAKS-COLLEGIUM of his Prussian Majesty
+was a thing much talked of in the world; but till Seckendorf and Grumkow
+started their grand operations there, its proceedings are not on record;
+nor indeed till then had its political or parliamentary function become
+so decidedly evident. It was originally a simple Smoking-Club; got
+together on hest of Nature, without ulterior intentions:--thus English
+PARLIAMENTA themselves are understood to have been, in the old Norman
+time, mere royal Christmas-Festivities, with natural colloquy or
+PARLEYING between King and Nobles ensuing thereupon, and what
+wisest consultation concerning the arduous things of the realm the
+circumstances gave rise to. Such parleyings or consultations,--always
+two in number in regard to every matter, it would seem, or even three;
+one sober, one drunk, and one just after being drunk,--proving of
+extreme service in practice, grew to be Parliament, with its three
+readings, and what not.
+
+A Smoking-room,--with wooden furniture, we can suppose,--in each of his
+Majesty's royal Palaces, was set apart for this evening service, and
+became the Tabagie of his Majesty. A Tabagie-room in the Berlin Schloss,
+another in the Potsdam, if the cicerone had any knowledge, could still
+be pointed out:--but the Tobacco-PIPES that are shown as Friedrich
+Wilhelm's in the KUNSTKAMMER or Museum of Berlin, pipes which no
+rational smoker, not compelled to it, would have used, awaken just doubt
+as to the cicerones; and you leave the Locality of the Tabagie a thing
+conjectural. In summer season, at Potsdam and in country situations,
+Tabagie could be held under a tent: we expressly know, his Majesty held
+Tabagie at Wusterhausen nightly on the Steps of the big Fountain, in
+the Outer Court there. Issuing from Wusterhausen Schloss, and its little
+clipped lindens, by the western side; passing the sentries, bridge and
+black ditch, with live Prussian eagles, vicious black bears, you come
+upon the royal Tabagie of Wusterhausen; covered by an awning, I should
+think; sending forth its bits of smoke-clouds, and its hum of human
+talk, into the wide free Desert round. Any room that was large enough,
+and had height of ceiling, and air-circulation and no cloth-furniture,
+would do: and in each Palace is one, or more than one, that has been
+fixed upon and fitted out for that object.
+
+A high large Room, as the Engravings (mostly worthless) give it us:
+contented saturnine human figures, a dozen or so of them, sitting round
+a large long Table, furnished for the occasion; long Dutch pipe in the
+mouth of each man; supplies of knaster easily accessible; small pan of
+burning peat, in the Dutch fashion (sandy native charcoal, which burns
+slowly without smoke), is at your left hand; at your right a jug,
+which I find to consist of excellent thin bitter beer. Other costlier
+materials for drinking, if you want such, are not beyond reach. On
+side-tables stand wholesome cold-meats, royal rounds of beef not
+wanting, with bread thinly sliced and buttered: in a rustic but neat
+and abundant way, such innocent accommodations, narcotic or nutritious,
+gaseous, fluid and solid, as human nature, bent on contemplation and
+an evening lounge, can require. Perfect equality is to be the rule; no
+rising, or notice taken, when anybody enters or leaves. Let the entering
+man take his place and pipe, without obligatory remarks: if he cannot
+smoke, which is Seckendorf's case for instance, let him at least affect
+to do so, and not ruffle the established stream of things. And so, Puff,
+slowly Pff!--and any comfortable speech that is in you; or none, if you
+authentically have not any.
+
+Old official gentlemen, military for most part; Grumkow, Derschau,
+Old Dessauer (when at hand), Seckendorf, old General Flans (rugged
+Platt-Deutsch specimen, capable of TOCADILLE or backgammon, capable of
+rough slashes of sarcasm when he opens his old beard for speech): these,
+and the like of these, intimate confidants of the King, men who could
+speak a little, or who could be socially silent otherwise,--seem to have
+been the staple of the Institution. Strangers of mark, who happened to
+be passing, were occasional guests; Ginckel the Dutch Ambassador, though
+foreign like Seckendorf, was well seen there; garrulous Pollnitz, who
+has wandered over all the world, had a standing invitation. Kings, high
+Princes on visit, were sure to have the honor. The Crown-Prince, now
+and afterwards, was often present; oftener than he liked,--in such an
+atmosphere, in such an element. "The little Princes were all wont
+to come in," doffing their bits of triangular hats, "and bid Papa
+good-night. One of the old Generals would sometimes put them through
+their exercise; and the little creatures were unwilling to go away to
+bed."
+
+In such Assemblage, when business of importance, foreign or domestic,
+was not occupying the royal thoughts,--the Talk, we can believe, was
+rambling and multifarious: the day's hunting, if at Wusterhausen; the
+day's news, if at Berlin or Potsdam; old reminiscences, too, I can
+fancy, turning up, and talk, even in Seckendorf's own time, about Siege
+of Menin (where your Majesty first did me the honor of some notice),
+Siege of Stralsund, and--duly on September 11th at least--Malplaquet,
+with Marlborough and Eugene: what Marlborough said, looked: and
+especially Lottum, late Feldmarschall Lottum; [Died 1719.] and how the
+Prussian Infantry held firm, like a wall of rocks, when the horse were
+swept away,--rocks highly volcanic, and capable of rolling forward too;
+and "how a certain Adjutant [Derschau smokes harder, and blushes brown]
+snatched poor Tettau on his back, bleeding to death, amid the iron
+whirlwinds, and brought him out of shot-range." [_ Militair-Lexikon,_
+iv. 78,? Major-General von Tettau, and i. 348,? Derschau. This was the
+beginning of Derschau's favor with Friedrich Wilhelm, who had witnesssed
+this piece of faithful work.]--"Hm, na, such a Day, that, Herr
+Feldzeugmeister, as we shall not see again till the Last of the Days!"
+
+Failing talk, there were Newspapers in abundance; scraggy Dutch
+Courants, Journals of the Rhine, FAMAS, Frankfurt ZEITUNGS; with which
+his Majesty exuberantly supplied himself;--being willing to know what
+was passing in the high places of the world, or even what in the dark
+snuffy Editor's thoughts was passing. This kind of matter, as some
+picture of the actual hour, his Majesty liked to have read to him, even
+during meal-time. Some subordinate character, with clear windpipe,--all
+the better too, if he be a book-man, cognizant of History, Geography,
+and can explain everything,--usually reads the Newspaper from some
+high seat behind backs, while his Majesty and Household dine. The same
+subordinate personage may be worth his place in the Tabagie, should
+his function happen to prove necessary there. Even book-men, though
+generally pedants and mere bags of wind and folly, are good for
+something, more especially if rich mines of quizzability turn out to be
+workable in them.
+
+
+
+
+OF GUNDLING, AND THE LITERARY MEN IN TOBACCO-PARLIAMENT.
+
+Friedrich Wilhelm had, in succession or sometimes simultaneously, a
+number of such Nondescripts, to read his Newspapers and season his
+Tabagie;--last evanescent phasis of the old Court-Fool species;--who
+form a noticeable feature of his environment. One very famous literary
+gentleman of this description, who distanced every competitor, in the
+Tabagie and elsewhere, for serving his Majesty's occasions, was Jakob
+Paul Gundling; a name still laughingly remembered among the Prussian
+People. Gundling was a Country-Clergyman's son, of the Nurnberg quarter;
+had studied, carrying off the honors, in various Universities; had read,
+or turned over, whole cartloads of wise and foolish Books (gravitating,
+I fear, towards the latter kind); had gone the Grand Tour as travelling
+tutor, "as companion to an English gentleman." He had seen courts,
+perhaps camps, at lowest cities and inns; knew in a manner, practically
+and theoretically, all things, and had published multifarious Books
+of his own. [List of them, Twenty-one in number, mostly on learned
+Antiquarian subjects,--in Forster, ii. 255, 256.] The sublime long-eared
+erudition of the man was not to be contested; manifest to everybody;
+thrice and four times manifest to himself, in the first place.
+
+In the course of his roamings, and grand and little tours, he had come
+to Berlin in old King Friedrich's time; had thrown powder in the eyes of
+men there, and been appointed to Professorships in the Ritter-Academy,
+to Chief-Heraldships,--"Historiographer Royal," and perhaps other honors
+and emoluments. The whole of which were cut down by the ruthless scythe
+of Friedrich Wilhelm, ruthlessly mowing his field clear, in the manner
+we saw at his Accession. Whereby learned grandiloquent Gundling, much
+addicted to liquor by this time, and turning the corner of forty, saw
+himself cast forth into the general wilderness; that is to say, walking
+the streets of Berlin, with no resources but what lay within himself and
+his own hungry skin. Much given to liquor too. How he lived, for a
+year or two after this,--erudite pen and braggart tongue his only
+resources,--were tragical to say. At length a famous Tavern-keeper, the
+"LEIPZIGE POLTER-HANS (Leipzig Kill-Cow, or BOISTEROUS-JACK)," as they
+call him, finding what a dungeon of erudite talk this Gundling was,
+and how gentlemen got entertained by him, gave Gundling the run of his
+Tavern (or, I fear, only a seat in the drinking-room); and it was here
+that General Grumkow found him, talking big, and disserting DE OMNI
+SCIBILI, to the ancient Berlin gentlemen over their cups. A very
+Dictionary of a man; who knows, in a manner, all things; and is by no
+means ignorant that he knows them: Would not this man suit his Majesty?
+thought Grumkow; and brought him to Majesty, to read the Newspapers and
+explain everything. Date is not given, or hinted at; but incidentally
+we find Gundling in full blast "in the year 1718;" [Von Loen, _Kleine
+Schriften_, i. 201 (cited in Forster, i. 260).] and conclude his
+instalment was a year or two before. Gundling came to his Majesty from
+the Tap-room of Boisterous-Jack; read the Newspapers, and explained
+everything: such a Dictionary-in-breeches (much given to liquor) as
+his Majesty had got, was never seen before. Working into the man, his
+Majesty, who had a great taste for such things, discovered in him such
+mines of college-learning, court-learning, without end; self-conceit,
+and depth of appetite, not less considerable: in fine, such Chaotic
+Blockheadism with the consciousness of being Wisdom, as was wondrous
+to behold,--as filled his Majesty, especially, with laughter and joyful
+amazement. Here are mines of native Darkness and Human Stupidity,
+capable of being made to phosphoresce and effervesce,--are there not,
+your Majesty? Omniscient Gundling was a prime resource in the Tabagie,
+for many years to come. Man with sublimer stores of long-eared Learning
+and Omniscience; man more destitute of Mother-wit, was nowhere to be
+met with. A man, bankrupt of Mother-wit;--who has Squandered any poor
+Mother-wit he had in the process of acquiring his sublime long-eared
+Omniscience; and has retained only depth of appetite,--appetite for
+liquor among other things, as the consummation and bottomless
+cesspool of appetites:--is not this a discovery we have made, in
+Boisterous-Jack's, your Majesty!
+
+The man was an Eldorado for the peculiar quizzing humor of his Majesty;
+who took immense delight in working him, when occasion served. In the
+first years, he had to attend his Majesty on all occasions of amusement;
+if you invite his Majesty to dinner, Gundling too must be of the party.
+Daily, otherwise, Gundling was at the Tabagie; getting drunk, if
+nothing better. Vein after vein, rich in broad fun (very broad and
+Brobdignagian, such as suits there), is discovered in him: without wit
+himself, but much the cause of wit. None oftener shook the Tabagie with
+inextinguishable Hahas: daily, by stirring into him, you could wrinkle
+the Tabagie into grim radiance of banter and silent grins.
+
+He wore sublime clothes: Friedrich Wilhelm, whom we saw dress up
+his regimental Scavenger-Executioners in French costume, for Count
+Rothenburg's behoof, made haste to load Gundling with Rathships,
+Kammerherrships, Titles such as fools covet;--gave him tolerable
+pensions too, poor devil, and even functions, if they were of the
+imaginary or big insignificant sort. Above all things, his Majesty
+dressed him, as the pink of fortunate ambitious courtiers. Superfine
+scarlet coat, gold buttonholes, black-velvet facings and embroideries
+without end: "straw-colored breeches; red silk stockings," with probably
+blue clocks to them, "and shoes with red heels:" on his learned head
+sat an immense cloud-periwig of white goat's-hair (the man now growing
+towards fifty); in the hat a red feather:--in this guise he walked the
+streets, the gold Key of KAMMERHERR (Chamberlain) conspicuously hanging
+at his coat-breast; and looked proudly down upon the world, when sober.
+Alas, he was often not sober; and fiends in human shape were ready
+enough to take advantage of his unguarded situation. No man suffered
+ruder tarring-and-feathering;--and his only comfort was his bane withal,
+that he had, under such conditions, the use of the royal cellars, and
+could always command good liquor there.
+
+His illustrious scarlet coat, by tumblings in the ditch, soon got dirty
+to a degree; and exposed him to the biting censures of his Majesty,
+anxious for the respectability of his Hofraths. One day, two wicked
+Captains, finding him prostrate in some lone place, cut off his
+Kammerherr KEY; and privately gave it to his Majesty. Majesty, in
+Tabagie, notices Gundling's coat-breast: "Where is your Key, then, Herr
+Kammerherr?" "Hm, hah--unfortunately lost it, Ihro Majestat!"--"Lost it,
+say you?" and his Majesty looks dreadfully grave.--"Key lost?" thinks
+Tabagie, grave Seckendorf included: "JARNI-BLEU, that is something
+serious!" "As if a Soldier were to drink his musket!" thinks his
+Majesty: "And what are the laws, if an ignorant fellow is shot, and a
+learned wise one escapes?" Here is matter for a deliberative Tabagie;
+and to poor Gundling a bad outlook, fatal or short of fatal. He had
+better not even drink much; but dispense with consolation, and keep his
+wits about him, till this squall pass. After much deliberating, it is
+found that the royal clemency can be extended; and an outlet devised,
+under conditions. Next Tabagie, a servant enters with one of the biggest
+trays in the world, and upon it a "Wooden Key gilt, about an ell long;"
+this gigantic implement is solemnly hung round the repentant Kammerherr;
+this he shall wear publicly as penance, and be upon his behavior, till
+the royal mind can relent. Figure the poor blockhead till that happen!
+"On recovering his metal key, he goes to a smith, and has it fixed on
+with wire."
+
+What Gundling thought to himself, amid these pranks and hoaxings, we do
+not know. The poor soul was not born a fool; though he had become one,
+by college-learning, vanity, strong-drink, and the world's perversity
+and his own. Under good guidance, especially if bred to strict silence,
+he might have been in some measure a luminous object,--not as now a
+phosphorescent one, shining by its mere rottenness! A sad "Calamity of
+Authors" indeed, when it overtakes a man!--Poor Gundling probably
+had lucid intervals now and then; tragic fits of discernment, in the
+inner-man of him. He had a Brother, also a learned man, who retained his
+senses; and was even a rather famed Professor at Halle; whose
+Portrait, looking very academic, solemn and well-to-do, turns up in
+old printshops; whose Books, concerning "Henry the Fowler (_De Henrico
+Aucupe_)," "Kaiser Conrad I.," and other dim Historical objects, are
+still consultable,--though with little profit, to my experience. The
+name of this one was NICOLAUS HIERONYMUS; ours is JAKOB PAUL, the senior
+brother,--once the hope of the House, it is likely, and a fond Father's
+pride,--in that poor old Nurnberg Parsonage long ago!
+
+Jakob Paul likewise continued to write Books, on Brandenburg Heraldries,
+Topography, Genealogies: even a "LIFE" or two of some old Brandenburg
+Electors are still extant from his hand; but not looked at now by any
+mortal. He had been, perhaps was again, Historiographer Royal; and felt
+bound to write such Books: several of them he printed; and we hear of
+others still manuscript, "in five folio volumes written fair." He held
+innumerable half-mock Titles and Offices; among others, was actual
+President of the Berlin Royal Society, or ACADEMIE DES SCIENCES,
+Leibnitz's pet daughter,--there Gundling actually sat in Office; and
+drew the salary, for one certainty. "As good he as another," thought
+Friedrich Wilhelm: "What is the use of these solemn fellows, in their
+big perukes, with their crabbed X+Y's, and scientiflc Pedler's-French;
+doing nothing that I can see, except annually the _Berlin Almanac,_
+which they live upon? Let them live upon it, and be thankful; with
+Gundling for their head man."
+
+Academy of Sciences makes its ALMANAC, and some peculium of profit by
+it; lectures perhaps a little "on Anatomy" (good for something, that,
+in his Majesty's mind); but languishes--without encouragement during
+the present reign. Has his Majesty no prize questions to propose, then?
+None, or worse. He once officially put these learned Associates upon
+ascertaining for him "Why Champagne foamed?" They, with a hidden vein
+of pleasantry, required "material to experiment upon." Friedrich Wilhelm
+sent them a dozen, or certain dozens; and the matter proved insoluble
+to this day. No King, scarcely any man, had less of reverence for
+the Sciences so called; for Academic culture, and the art of the
+Talking-Schoolmaster in general! A King obtuse to the fine Arts,
+especially to the vocal Arts, in a high degree. Literary fame itself he
+regards as mountebank fame; the art of writing big admirable folios
+is little better to him than that of vomiting long coils of wonderful
+ribbon, for the idlers of the market-place; and he bear-baits his
+Gundling, in this manner, as phosphorescent blockhead of the first
+magnitude, worthy of nothing better.
+
+Nay, it is but lately (1723 the exact year) that he did his
+ever-memorable feat in regard to Wolf and his Philosophy, at Halle.
+Illustrious Wolf was recognized, at that time, as the second greater
+Leibnitz, and Head-Philosopher of Nature, who "by mathematical method"
+had as it were taken Nature in the fact, and illuminated everything, so
+that whosoever ran might read,--which all manner of people then tried
+to do, but, have now quite ceased trying "by the Wolf-method:"--Immortal
+Wolf, somewhat of a stiff, reserved humor, inwardly a little proud, and
+not wanting in private contempt of the contemptible, had been accused of
+heterodoxy by the Halle Theologians. Immortal Wolf, croakily satirical
+withal, had of course defended himself; and of course got into a
+shoreless sea of controversy with the Halle Theologians; pestering his
+Majesty with mere wars, and rumors of war, for a length of time, from
+that Halle University. [In Busching (_Beitrage,_ i. l-140) is rough
+authentic account of Wolf, and especially of all that,--with several
+curious LETTERS of Wolf's.] So that Majesty, unable to distinguish top
+or bottom in such a coil of argument; or to do justice in the case,
+however willing and anxious, often passionately asked: "What, in
+God's name, is the real truth of it?" Majesty appointed Commissions to
+inquire; read Reports; could for a long while make out nothing certain.
+At last came a decision on the sudden;--royal mind suddenly illuminated,
+it is a little uncertain how. Some give the credit of it to Gundling,
+which is unlikely; others to "Two Generals" of pious orthodox turn,
+acquainted with Halle;--and I have heard obscurely that it was the Old
+Dessauer, who also knew Halle; and was no doubt wearied to hear nothing
+talked of there but injured Philosopher Wolf, and injuring Theologian
+Lange, or VICE VERSA. Some practical military man, not given to take up
+with shadows, it likeliest was. "In God's name, what is the real truth
+of all that?" inquired his Majesty, of the practical man: "DOES Wolf
+teach hellish doctrines; as Lange says, or heavenly, as himself says?"
+"Teaches babble mainly, I should think, and scientific Pedler's French,"
+intimated the practical man: "But they say he has one doctrine about
+oaths, and what he calls foundation of duty, which I did not like. Not
+a heavenly doctrine that. Follow out that, any of your Majesty's
+grenadiers might desert, and say he had done no sin against God!"
+[Busching, i. 8; Benekendorf, _Karakterzilge aus dem Leben Konig
+Friedrich Wilhelm I._ (Anonymous, Berlin, 1787), ii. 23.] Friedrich
+Wilhelm flew into a paroxysm of horror; instantly redacted brief Royal
+Decree [15th November (Busching says 8th), 1723.] (which is still extant
+among the curiosities of the Universe), ordering Wolf to quit Halle
+and the Prussian Dominions, bag and baggage, forevermore, within
+eight-and-forty hours, "BEY STRAFE DES STRANGES, under pain of the
+halter!"
+
+Halter: the Head-Philosopher of Nature, found too late, will be hanged,
+as if he were a sheep-stealer; hanged, and no mistake! Poor Wolf
+gathered himself together, wife and baggage; girded up his loins;
+and ran with the due despatch. He is now found sheltered under
+Hessen-Darmstadt, at Marburg, professing something there; and all the
+intellect of the world is struck with astonishment, and with silent or
+vocal pity for the poor man.--It is but fair to say, Friedrich Wilhelm,
+gradually taking notice of the world's humor in regard to this, began to
+have his own misgivings; and determined to read some of Wolf's Books for
+himself. Reading in Wolf, he had sense to discern that here was a man of
+undeniable talent and integrity; that the Practical Military judgment,
+loading with the iron ramrod, had shot wide of the mark, in this matter;
+and, in short, that a palpable bit of foul-play had been done. This was
+in 1733;--ten years after the shot, when his Majesty saw, with his own
+eyes, how wide it had gone. He applied to Wolf earnestly, more than
+once, to come back to him: Halle, Frankfurt, any Prussian University
+with a vacancy in it, was now wide open to Wolf. But Wolf knew better:
+Wolf, with bows down to the ground, answered always evadingly;--and
+never would come back till the New Reign began.
+
+Friedrich Wilhelm knew little of Book-learning or Book-writing; and
+his notion of it is very shocking to us. But the fact is, O reader,
+Book-writing is of two kinds: one wise, and may be among the wisest
+of earthly things; the other foolish, sometimes far beyond what can be
+reached by human nature elsewhere. Blockheadism, Unwisdom, while
+silent, is reckoned bad; but Blockheadism getting vocal, able to speak
+persuasively,--have you considered that at all? Human Opacity falling
+into Phosphorescence; that is to say, becoming luminous (to itself and
+to many mortals) by the very excess of it, by the very bursting of
+it into putrid fermentation;--all other forms of Chaos are cosmic in
+comparison!--Our poor Friedrich Wilhelm had seen only Gundlings among
+the Book-writing class: had he seen wiser specimens, he might have
+formed, as he did in Wolf's case, another judgment. Nay in regard to
+Gundling himself, it is observable how, with his unutterable contempt,
+he seems to notice in him glimpses of the admirable (such acquirements,
+such dictionary-faculties, though gone distracted!),--and almost has a
+kind of love for the absurd dog. Gundling's pensions amount to something
+like 150 pounds; an immense sum in this Court. [Forster, i. 263, 284
+(if you can RECONCILE the two passages).] A blockhead admirable in some
+sorts; and of immense resource in Tobacco-Parliament when business is
+slack!--
+
+No end to the wild pranks, the Houyhnhnm horse-play they had with
+drunken Gundling. He has staggered out in a drunk state, and found, or
+not clearly FOUND till the morrow, young bears lying in his bed;--has
+found his room-door walled up; been obliged to grope about, staggering
+from door to door and from port to port, and land ultimately in the
+big Bears' den, who hugged and squeezed him inhumanly there. Once at
+Wusterhausen, staggering blind-drunk out of the Schloss towards his
+lair, the sentries at the Bridge (instigated to it by the Houyhnhnms,
+who look on) pretend to fasten some military blame on him: Why has
+he omitted or committed so-and-so? Gundling's drunk answer is
+unsatisfactory. "Arrest, Herr Kammerrath, is it to be that, then!" They
+hustle him about, among the Bears which lodge there;--at length they
+lay him horizontally across two ropes;--take to swinging him hither and
+thither, up and down, across the black Acherontic Ditch, which is frozen
+over, it being the dead of winter: one of the ropes, LOWER rope, breaks;
+Gundling comes souse upon the ice with his sitting-part; breaks a big
+hole in the ice, and scarcely with legs, arms and the remaining rope,
+can be got out undrowned. [Forster (i. 254-280); founding, I suppose,
+on _Leben und Thaten des Freiherrn Paul von Gundling_ (Berlin, 1795);
+probably not one of the exactest Biographies.]
+
+If, with natural indignation, he shut his door, and refuse to come to
+the Tabagie, they knock in a panel of his door; and force him out with
+crackers, fire-works, rockets and malodorous projectiles. Once the poor
+blockhead, becoming human for a moment, went clean away; to Halle where
+his Brother was, or to some safer place: but the due inveiglements,
+sublime apologies, increase of titles, salaries, were used; and the
+indispensable Phosphorescent Blockhead, and President of the Academy of
+Pedler's-French, was got back. Drink remained always as his consolation;
+drink, and the deathless Volumes he was writing and printing. Sublime
+returns came to him;--Kaiser's Portrait set in diamonds, on one
+occasion,--for his Presentation-Copies in high quarters: immortal fame,
+is it not his clear portion; still more clearly abundance of good wine.
+Friedrich Wilhelm did not let him want for Titles;--raised him at last
+to the Peerage; drawing out the Diploma and Armorial Blazonry, in a
+truly Friedrich-Wilhelm manner, with his own hand. The Gundlings,
+in virtue of the transcendent intellect and merits of this Founder
+Gundling, are, and are hereby declared to be, of Baronial dignity to the
+last scion of them; and in "all RITTER-RENNEN (Tournaments), Battles,
+Fights, Camp-pitchings, Sealings, Sightings, shall and may use the
+above-said Shield of Arms,"--if it can be of any advantage to them. A
+Prussian Majesty who gives us 150 pounds yearly, with board and lodging
+and the run of his cellar, and honors such as these, is not to be
+lightly sneezed away, though of queer humors now and then. The
+highest Personages, as we said, more than once made gifts to Gundling;
+miniatures set in diamonds; purses of a hundred ducats: even Gundling,
+it was thought, might throw in a word, mad or otherwise, which would
+bear fruit. It was said of him, he never spoke to harm anybody with his
+Majesty. The poor blown-up blockhead was radically not ill-natured,--at
+least, if you let his "phosphorescences" alone.
+
+But the grandest explosions, in Tobacco-Parliament, were producible,
+when you got Two literary fools; and, as if with Leyden-jars, positive
+and negative, brought their vanities to bear on one another. This
+sometimes happened, when Tobacco-Parliament was in luck. Friedrich
+Wilhelm had a variety of Merry-Andrew Raths of the Gundling sort,
+though none ever came up to Gundling, or approached him, in worth as a
+Merry-Andrew.
+
+Herr Fassmann, who wrote Books, by Patronage or for the Leipzig
+Booksellers, and wandered about the world as a star or comet of some
+magnitude, is not much known to my readers:--but he is too well known
+to me, for certain dark Books of his which I have had to read. [_Life of
+Friedrich Wilhelm,_ occasionally cited here; _Life of August the Strong;
+_ &c.] A very dim Literary Figure; undeniable, indecipherable Human
+Fact, of those days; now fallen quite extinct and obsolete; his
+garniture, equipment, environment all very dark to us. Probably a too
+restless, imponderous creature, too much of the Gundling type; structure
+of him GASEOUS, not solid; Perhaps a little of the coxcomb naturally;
+much of the sycophant on compulsion,--being sorely jammed into corners,
+and without elbow-room at all, in this world. Has, for the rest, a
+recognizable talent for "Magazine writing,"--for Newspaper editing, had
+that rich mine, "California of the Spiritually Vagabond," been opened in
+those days. Poor extinct Fassmann, one discovers at last a vein of weak
+geniality in him; here and there, real human sense and eyesight, under
+those strange conditions; and his poor Books, rotted now to inanity,
+have left a small seed-pearl or two, to the earnest reader. Alas, if
+he WAS to become "spiritually vagabond" ("spiritually" and otherwise),
+might it not perhaps be wholesome to him that the California was NOT
+discovered?--
+
+Fassmann was by no means such a fool as Gundling; but, he was much of a
+fool too. He had come to Berlin, about this time, [1726, as he himself
+says (supra p. 8).] in hopes of patronage from the King or somebody;
+might say to himself, "Surely I am a better man than Gundling, if
+the Berlin Court has eyesight." By the King, on some wise General's
+recommending it, he was, as a preliminary, introduced to the Tabagie
+at least. Here is the celebrated Gundling; there is the celebrated
+Fassmann. Positive Leyden-jar, with negative close by: in each of these
+two men lodges a full-charged fiery electric virtue of self-conceit;
+destructive each of the other;--could a conductor be discovered.
+Conductors are discoverable, conductors are not wanting; and many
+are the explosions between these mutually-destructive human
+varieties;--welcomed with hilarious, rather vacant, huge horse-laughter,
+in this Tobacco-Parliament and Synod of the Houyhnhnms.
+
+Of which take this acme; and then end. Fassmann, a fellow not without
+sarcasm and sharpness, as you may still see, has one evening provoked
+Gundling to the transcendent pitch,--till words are weak, and only
+action will answer. Gundling, driven to the exploding point, suddenly
+seizes his Dutch smoking-pan, of peat-charcoal ashes and red-hot sand;
+and dashes it in the face of Fassmann; who is of course dreadfully
+astonished thereby, and has got his very eyebrows burnt, not to speak of
+other injuries. Stand to him, Fassmann! Fassmann stands to him tightly,
+being the better man as well as the more satirical; grasps Gundling
+by the collar, wrenches him about, lays him at last over his knee,
+sitting-part uppermost; slaps said sitting-part (poor sitting-part that
+had broken the ice of Wusterhausen) with the hot pan,--nay some say,
+strips it and slaps. Amid the inextinguishable horse-laughter (sincere
+but vacant) of the Houyhnhnm Olympus.
+
+After which, his Majesty, as epilogue to such play, suggests, That feats
+of that nature are unseemly among gentlemen; that when gentlemen have
+a quarrel, there is another way of settling it. Fassmann thereupon
+challenges Gundling; Gundling accepts; time and place are settled,
+pistols the weapon. At the appointed time and place Gundling stands,
+accordingly, pistol in hand; but at sight of Fassmann, throws his pistol
+away; will not shoot any man, nor have any man shoot him. Fassmann
+sternly advances; shoots his pistol (powder merely) into Gundling's
+sublime goat's-hair wig: wig blazes into flame; Gundling falls
+shrieking, a dead man, to the earth; and they quench and revive him
+with a bucket of water. Was there ever seen such horse-play? Roaring
+laughter, huge, rude, and somewhat vacant, as that of the Norse gods
+over their ale at Yule time;--as if the face of the Sphinx were to
+wrinkle itself in laughter; or the fabulous Houyhnhnms themselves were
+there to mock in their peculiar fashion.
+
+His Majesty at length gave Gundling a wine-cask, duly figured;
+"painted black with a white cross," which was to stand in his room as
+MEMENTO-MORI, and be his coffin. It stood for ten years; Gundling often
+sitting to write in it; a good screen against draughts. And the poor
+monster was actually buried in this cask; [Died 11th April, 1731, age
+58: description of the Burial "at Bornstadt near Potsdam," in Forster,
+i. 276.] Fassmann pronouncing some funeral oration,--and the orthodox
+clergy uttering, from the distance, only a mute groan. "The Herr Baron
+von Gundling was a man of many dignities, of much Book-learning; a man
+of great memory," admits Fassmann, "but of no judgment," insinuates
+he,--"LOOKING FOR the Judgment (EXPECTANS JUDICIUM)," says Fassmann, with
+a pleasant wit. Fassmann succeeded to all the emoluments and honors; but
+did not hold them; preferred to run away before long: and after him
+came one and the other, whom the reader is not to be troubled with here.
+Enough if the patient reader have seen, a little, into that background
+of Friedrich Wilhelm's existence; and, for the didactic part, have
+caught up his real views or instincts upon Spiritual Phosphorescence, or
+Stupidity grown Vocal, which are much sounder than most of us suspect.
+
+These were the sports of the Tobacco-Parliament; and it was always meant
+primarily for sport, for recreation: but there is no doubt it had a
+serious function as well. "Business matters," adds Beneckendorf, who had
+means of knowing, [Benekendorf, _Karakterzuge,_ i. 137-149; vi. 37.]
+"were often a subject of colloquy in the TABAKS-COLLEGIUM. Not that they
+were there finished off, decided upon, or meant to be so. But Friedrich
+Wilhelm often purposely brought up such things in conversation there,
+that he might learn the different opinions of his generals and chief
+men, without their observing it,"--and so might profit by the Collective
+Wisdom, in short.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII. -- SECKENDORF'S RETORT TO HER MAJESTY.
+
+The Treaty of Wusterhausen was not yet known to Queen Sophie, to her
+Father George, or to any external creature: but that open flinching, and
+gradual withdrawal, from the Treaty of Hanover was too well known; and
+boded no good to her pet project. Female sighs, male obduracies, and
+other domestic phenomena, are to be imagined in consequence. "A grand
+Britannic Majesty indeed; very lofty Father to us, Madam, ever since he
+came to be King of England: Stalking along there, with his nose in the
+air; not deigning the least notice of us, except as of a thing that
+may be got to fight for him! And he does not sign the Double-Marriage
+Treaty, Madam; only talks of signing it,--as if we were a starved
+coach-horse, to be quickened along by a wisp of hay put upon the
+coach-pole close ahead of us always!"--"JARNI-BLEU!" snuffles Seckendorf
+with a virtuous zeal, or looks it; and things are not pleasant at the
+royal dinner-table.
+
+Excellenz Seckendorf, we find at this time, "often has his Majesty
+to dinner:" and such dinners; fitting one's tastes in all points,--no
+expense regarded (which indeed is the Kaiser's, if we knew it)! And in
+return, Excellenz is frequently at dinner with his Majesty; where the
+conversation; if it turn on England, which often happens, is more
+and more an offence to Queen Sophie. Seckendorf studies to be polite,
+reserved before the Queen's Majesty at her own table; yet sometimes he
+lisps out, in his vile snuffling tone, half-insinuations, remarks on our
+Royal Kindred, which are irritating in the extreme. Queen Sophie, the
+politest of women, did once, says Pollnitz, on some excessive pressure
+of that lisping snuffling unendurability, lose her royal patience
+and flame out. With human frankness, and uncommonly kindled eyes,
+she signified to Seckendorf, That none who was not himself a kind of
+scoundrel could entertain such thoughts of Kings and gentlemen! Which
+hard saying kindled the stiff-backed rheumatic soul of Seckendorf
+(Excellenz had withal a temper in him, far down in the deeps); who
+answered: "Your Majesty, that is what no one else thinks of me. That
+is a name I have never permitted any one to give me with impunity." And
+verily, he kept his threat in that latter point, says Pollnitz. [ii.
+244.]
+
+At this stage, it is becoming, in the nature of things, unlikely that
+the projected Double-Marriage, or any union with England, can ever
+realize itself for Queen Sophie and her House. The Kaiser has decreed
+that it never shall. Here is the King already irritated, grown
+indisposed to it; here is the Kaiser's Seckendorf, with preternatural
+Apparatus, come to maintain him in that humor. To Queen Sophie herself,
+who saw only the outside of Seckendorf and his Apparatus, the matter
+doubtless seemed big with difficulties; but to us, who see the interior,
+the difficulties are plainly hopeless. Unless the Kaiser's mind change,
+unless many fixed things change, the Double-Marriage is impossible.
+
+One thing only is a sorrow; and this proved an immeasurable one: That
+they did not, that Queen Sophie did not, in such case, frankly give
+it up: Double-Marriage is not a law of Nature; it is only a project
+at Hanover that has gone off again. There will be a life for our
+Crown-Prince, and Princess, without a marriage with England!-It is
+greatly wise to recognize the impossible, the unreasonably difficult,
+when it presents itself: but who of men is there, much more who of women
+that can always do it?
+
+Queen Sophie Dorothee will have this Double-Marriage, and it shall be
+possible. Pour Lady, she was very obstinate; and her Husband was very
+arbitrary. A rough bear of a Husband, yet by no means an unloving one; a
+Husband who might have been managed. She evidently made a great mistake
+in deciding not to obey this man; as she had once vowed. By perfect
+prompt obedience she might have had a very tolerable life with the
+rugged Orson fallen to her lot; who was a very honest-hearted creature.
+She might have done a pretty stroke of female work, withal, in taming
+her Orson; might have led him by the muzzle far enough in a private
+way,--by obedience.
+
+But by disobedience, by rebellion open or secret? Friedrich Wilhelm was
+a Husband; Friedrich Wilhelm was a King; and the most imperative man
+then breathing. Disobedience to Friedrich Wilhelm was a thing which, in
+the Prussian State, still more in the Berlin Schloss and vital heart of
+said State, the laws of Heaven and of Earth had not permitted, for any
+man's or any woman's sake, to be. The wide overarching sky looks down on
+no more inflexible Sovereign Man than him in the red-collared blue coat
+and white leggings, with the bamboo in his hand. A peaceable, capacious,
+not ill-given Sovereign Man, if you will let him have his way. But
+to bar his way; to tweak the nose of his sovereign royalty, and
+ignominiously force him into another way: that is an enterprise no
+man or devil, or body of men or devils, need attempt. Seckendorf and
+Grumkow, in Tobacco-Parliament, understand it better. That attempt is
+impossible, once for all. The first step in such attempt will require to
+be assassination of Friedrich Wilhelm; for you may depend on it, royal
+Sophie, so long as he is alive, the feat cannot be done. O royal Sophie,
+O pretty Feekin, what a business you are making of it!
+
+The year 1726 was throughout a troublous one to Queen Sophie.
+Seckendorf's advent; King George's manifestoing; alarm of imminent
+universal War, nay sputters of it actually beginning (Gibraltar invested
+by the Spaniards, ready for besieging, it is said): nor was this all.
+Sophie's poor Mother, worn to a tragic Megaera, locked so long in the
+Castle of Ahlden, has taken up wild plans of outbreak, of escape by
+means of secretaries, moneys in the Bank of Amsterdam, and I know not
+what; with all which Sophie, corresponding in double and triple mystery,
+has her own terrors and sorrows, trying to keep it down. And now, in the
+depth of the year, the poor old Mother suddenly dies. [13th November,
+1726: _Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea, Consort of George I._ (i.
+386),--where also some of her concluding Letters ("edited" as if by the
+Nightmares) can be read, but next to no sense made of them.] Burnt out
+in this manner, she collapses into ashes and long rest; closing so her
+nameless tragedy of thirty years' continuance:--what a Bluebeard-chamber
+in the mind of Sophie! Nay there rise quarrels about the Heritage of the
+Deceased, which will prove another sorrow.
+
+
+
+END OF BOOK V
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia,
+Volume V. (of XXI.), by Thomas Carlyle
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