ury and Choiseul. For the manners of the court
of Louis XV., the numerous memoirs and letters, which were
written during the period, must be consulted; the most
amusing of which, and, in a certain sense, instructive, are
too infamous to be named.

CHAPTER XXIII.

FREDERIC THE GREAT.

[Sidenote: Frederic William.]

Frederic II. of Prussia has won a name which will be immortal on
Moloch's catalogue of military heroes. His singular character extorts
our admiration, while it calls forth our aversion, admiration for his
great abilities, sagacity, and self-reliance, and disgust for his
cruelties, his malice, his suspicions, and his tricks. He had no faith
in virtue or disinterestedness, and trusted only to mechanical
agencies--to the power of armies--to the principle of fear. He was not
indifferent to literature, or the improvement of his nation; but war
was alike his absorbing passion and his highest glory. Peter the Great
was half a barbarian, and Charles XII. half a madman; but Frederic was
neither barbarous in his tastes, nor wild in his schemes. Louis XIV.
plunged his nation in war from puerile egotism, and William III.
fought for the great cause of religious and civil liberty; but
Frederic, from the excitement which war produced, and the restless
ambition of plundering what was not his own.

He was born in the royal palace of Berlin, in 1712--ten years after
Prussia had become a kingdom, and in the lifetime of his grandfather,
Frederic I. The fortunes of his family were made by his
great-grandfather, called the _Great Elector_, of the house of
Hohenzollern. He could not make Brandenburg a fertile province; so he
turned it into a military state. He was wise, benignant, and
universally beloved. But few of his amiable qualities were inherited
by his great-grandson. Frederic II. resembled more his whimsical and
tyrannical father, Frederic William, who beat his children without a
cause, and sent his subjects to prison from mere caprice. When his
ambassador, in London, was allowed only one thousand pounds a year, he
gave a bounty of thirteen hundred pounds to a tall Irishman, to join
his famous body-guard, a regiment of men who were each over six feet
high. He would kick women in the streets, abuse clergymen for looking
on the soldiers, and insult his son's tutor for teaching him Latin.
But, abating his coarseness, his brutality, and his cruelty, he was a
Christian, after a certain model. He