and the other crushed to death by the weighty
dress, especially the metal crown, put on it at
the christening.

When this son that did live to reign was
born, his father, Friedrich Wilhelm, was in
his twenty-fourth year: a thick-set, sturdy,
florid, brisk young fellow, with a jovial laugh
in him; yet of solid grave ways, occasionally
somewhat volcanic; much given to soldiering,
and out of-door exercises, having little
else to do at present. He musters, drills,
hunts, and keeps to himself his thoughts
about the state of public business. He has
seen service in his youth with Marlborough
and Prince Eugene: was one in the terrible
and deadly battle of Malplaquet, of which all
his life long he kept the anniversary.

He had lost his mother seven years before,
and was vexed with a mother-in-law—a
she-Dominic, who troubled the rest of the life of
the expensive Herr Friedrich the First.
She at last went mad, and proved the death
of the old king. "For he sat one morning,
in the chill February days of the year seventeen
hundred and thirteen, in his apartment,
as usual; weak of nerves, but thinking no
special evil; when, suddenly, with huge
jingle, the glass door of his room went to
shreds; and there rushed in, bleeding and
dishevelled, the fatal White Lady (Weisse
Frau), who is understood to walk that Schloss
at Berlin, and announce death to the royal
inhabitants. Majesty had fainted, or was
fainting. Weisse Frau? O, no, your majesty!
Not that; but, indeed, something almost
worse. Mad queen in her apartments had
been seized that, day, when half or quarter
dressed, with unusual orthodoxy or unusual
jealousy. Watching her opportunity, she had
whisked into the corridor in extreme
deshabille, and gone, like the wild roe, to
Majesty's suite of rooms; through Majesty's
glass door like a catapult; and emerged, as
we saw, in petticoat and shift, with hair
streaming, eyes glittering, arms cut, and
other sad trimmings. O Heaven! who could
laugh? There are tears due to kings and to
all men. It was deep misery; deep enough
Sin and misery, as Calvin well says, on
the one side and the other! The poor old
king was carried to bed, and never rose
again, but died in a few days." His little
grandson was then in his fourteenth month.
Friedrich Wilhelm, out of filial piety, wore
at his father's funeral the grand French
peruke, and other sublimities of French
costume; he then flung them aside for ever.
As a child, he had poked into the fire a
magnificent little dressing-gown given him. He
began his reform at the earliest moment.
When summoned to his father's death
chamber, he found it full of gold-sticks,
silver-sticks, and other solemn histrionic
functionaries. The death-struggle over,
Friedrich Wilhelm shut himself up for half-
an-hour with his grief, then summoned the
upper court-marshal, and informed the court
people through him, that till the funeral was
at an end, their service would continue; and
that, on the morrow after the funeral, they
were, every soul of them, discharged; and,
from the highest gold-stick down to the
lowest page-in-waiting, the king's house
should be swept entirely clean of them— said
house intending to start afresh upon a quite
new footing. In the like ruthless humour,
he went over his pension list, struck
three-fourths of it away, and reduced the remaining
fourth to the bone. Went in the same spirit
through all departments of the government.
In his father's stud had been a thousand
saddle-horses, Friedrich Wilhelm would not
maintain more than thirty.

Such was the father to whom Frederick
the Great in his youth served his apprenticeship.
An absolute king, perhaps penurious,
but honestly penurious— the husband of his
country. He compelled men to be just in
their work, and if he met an idler, laid upon
him with the stick he always carried in his
hand. He developed manufactures, made
roads, drained marshes, saved money, and
hoarded it in barrels as a secret power for
his new-created kingdom. He even decreed
that the apple-women in Berlin should knit,
and not sit idle at their stalls. His hobby
for soldiering developed marvellously in
effective force and discipline the Prussian
army. He husbanded the strength of his
country, while the kings about him were all
spendthrifts of their national resources. If
he was rugged, obstinate, despotic, ready to
hang an assured thief without trial, whatever
his station, prompt to beat even his grown-up
children when they offended him, pushing
some hobbies and prejudices to the verge of
madness, he was yet, says Mr. Carlyle, a
true man, a man with an unspoken poem in
him. His insatiable thirst for more giants
to be enlisted in the Potsdam grenadiers— a
company containing some men of nine feet,
perhaps, and none under six feet or six feet
six, was but as the nice restlessness of a
poet polishing and repolishing a stanza.
Apprenticeship to such a master would have
been easy to few; to Frederick it was
peculiarly hard, and, at the same time, peculiarly
wholesome. For the boy took to those
things that his father hated; affected the
French style and manners, which were to the
rough German king abomination; held lightly
in regard religious sentiments which lay deep
in the soul of this strong-hearted man,
ridiculed what was hard earnest to his angry
father, dallied with ladies, read French books,
and played upon the flute. Who can say to
what end the genius that was in him might
have tended, but for those years of hard
probation which we now, in the light Mr.
Carlyle holds to them, are able to see so
distinctly?

At the root of the child's education there
were two elements, one French and the other
German. His nurses and governesses were