es after 1815, though a great part of the English middle classes
may well have connected them with the time when Frederick II. was
earning his title of the Great, along with a number of other territorial
titles to which he had considerably less claim. Sincere and
simple-hearted Dissenting ministers would dismount before that sign (for
in those days Dissenters drank beer like Christians, and indeed
manufactured most of it) and would pledge the old valour and the old
victory of him whom they called the Protestant Hero. We should be using
every word with literal exactitude if we said that he was really
something devilish like a hero. Whether he was a Protestant hero or not
can be decided best by those who have read the correspondence of a
writer calling himself Voltaire, who was quite shocked at Frederick's
utter lack of religion of any kind. But the little Dissenter drank his
beer in all innocence and rode on. And the great blasphemer of Potsdam
would have laughed had he known; it was a jest after his own heart. Such
was the jest he made when he called upon the emperors to come to
communion, and partake of the eucharistic body of Poland. Had he been
such a Bible reader as the Dissenter doubtless thought him, he might
haply have foreseen the vengeance of humanity upon his house. He might
have known what Poland was and was yet to be; he might have known that
he ate and drank to his damnation, discerning not the body of God.

Whether the placing of the present German Emperor in charge of one of
these wayside public-houses would be a jest after _his_ own heart
possibly remains to be seen. But it would be much more melodious and
fitting an end than any of the sublime euthanasias which his enemies
provide for him. That old sign creaking above him as he sat on the bench
outside his home of exile would be a much more genuine memory of the
real greatness of his race than the modern and almost gimcrack stars and
garters that were pulled in Windsor Chapel. From modern knighthood has
departed all shadow of chivalry; how far we have travelled from it can
easily be tested by the mere suggestion that Sir Thomas Lipton, let us
say, should wear his lady's sleeve round his hat or should watch his
armour in the Chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The giving and
receiving of the Garter among despots and diplomatists is now only part
of that sort of pottering mutual politeness which keeps the peace in an
insecure and insincere state of society