+141H 418 1881

FREDERICK THE GREAT.

THE Prussian monarchy, the youngest of the great European States, but in population and in revenue the fifth amongst them, and in art, science, and civilization entitled to the third, if not the second place, sprang from an humble origin. About the beginning of the fifteenth century, the marquisate of Brandenburg was bestowed by the Emperor Sigismund on the noble family of Hohenzollern. In the sixteenth century that family embraced the Lutheran doctrines. Early in the seventeenth century it obtained from the King of Poland the investiture of the duchy of Prussia. Even after this accession of territory, the chiefs of the house of Hohenzollern hardly ranked with the Electors of Saxony and Bavaria. The soil of Brandenburg was, for the most part, sterile. Even around Berlin, the capital of the province, and around Potsdam, the favorite residence of the Margraves, the country was a desert. In some tracts the deep sand could with difficulty be forced by assiduous tillage to yield thin crops of rye and oats. In other places, the ancient forests, from which the conquerors of the Roman empire had descended on the Danube, remained untouched by the hand of man. Where the soil was rich it was generally marshy, and its insalubrity repelled the cultivators whom its fertility attracted. Frederick William, called the Great Elector, was the prince to whose policy his successors have agreed to ascribe their greatness. He acquired by the peace of Westphalia several valuable possessions, and among them the rich city and district of Magdeburg; and he left to his son Frederick a principality as considerable as any which was not called a kingdom.

Frederick aspired to the style of royalty. Ostentatious and profuse, negligent of his true interests and of his high duties, insatiably eager for frivolous distinctions, he added nothing to the real weight of the State which he governed; but he gained the great object of his life, the title of king. In the year 1700 he assumed this new dignity. He had on that occasion to undergo all the mortifications which fall to the lot of ambitious upstarts. Compared with the other crowned heads of Europe, he made a figure resembling that which a Nabob or a Commissary, who had bought a title, would make in the company of Peers whose ancestors had been attainted for treason against the Plantagenets.

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

Frederick was succeeded by his son, Frederick William, a prince who must be allowed to have possessed some talents for administration, but whose character was disfigured by the most odious vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never been seen out of a madhouse. He was exact and diligent in the transaction of business, and he was the first who formed the design of obtaining for Prussia a place among the European powers, altogether out of proportion to her extent and population, by means of a strong military organization. Strict economy enabled him to keep up a peace establishment of sixty thousand troops. These troops were disciplined in such a manner, that, placed beside them, the household regiments of Versailles and St. James would have appeared an awkward squad. The master of such a force could not but be regarded by all his neighbors as a formidable enemy and a valuable ally.

But the mind of Frederick William was so ill-regulated that all his inclinations became passions, and all his passions partook of the character of moral and intellectual disease. His parsimony degenerated into sordid avarice. His taste for military pomp and order became a mania, like that of a Dutch burgomaster for tulips. While the envoys of the court of Berlin wer in a state of such squalid poverty as moved the laughter of foreign capitals-while the food of the royal family was so bad that even hunger loathed it-no price was thought too extravagant for tall recruits. The ambition of the king was to form a brigade of giants, and every country was ransacked by his agents for men above the ordinary stature. These researches were not confined to Europe. No head that towered above the crowd in the bazaars of Aleppo, of Cairo, or of Surat, could escape the crimps of Frederick William. One Irishman more than seven feet high, who was picked up in London hy the Prussian ambassador, received a bounty of nearly £1,300 sterling-very much more than the ambassador's salary. This extravagance was the more absurd because a stout youth of five feet eight, who might have been procured for a few dollars, would in all probability have been a much more valuable soldier. But to Frederick William this huge Irishman was what a brass Otho or a Vinegar Bible is to a collector of a different kind.*

Carlyle thus describes the Potsdam Regiment :-" A Potsdam Giant Regiment, such as the world never saw before or since. Three Battalions of them-two always here at Potsdam doing formal life-guard duty, the third at Brandenburg on drill, 830 to the Batallion-2,400 sons of Anak in all. Sublime enough, hugely per

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

Frederick, surnamed the Great, son of Frederick William, was born in January, 1712. It may safely be pronounced that he had received from nature a strong and sharp understanding, and a rare firmness of temper and intensity of will. As to the other parts of his character, it is difficult to say whether they are to be ascribed to nature or to the strange training which he underwent. The history of his boyhood is painfully interesting. Oliver Twist in the parish workhouse, Smike at Dotheboys Hall, were petted children when compared with this wretched heir-apparent of a crown. The nature of Frederick William was hard aud bad, and the habit of exercising arbitrary power had made him frightfully savage. His rage constantly vented

fect 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 vulzar dusk of things.

"Truly they are men supreme in discipline, in beauty of equipment, and the shortest man of them rises, I think, toward 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 ex ense, not to speak of other trouble to His Majesty. James Kirkman, an Irish recruit of good inches, cost him £1,200 before he could be got inveigled, shipped, and brought safe to hand. The docu ments are yet in existence; 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 you 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'Dow 1. This Hohr ann was now Flüglemann ('fugleman' as we have n med it, leader of the file), the Tallest of the Regiment, a very mountain of pipe-clayed flesh and bone."