middle years of the eighteenth century. Frederick
was merely an extreme instance of a universal fact. Like all Germans of
any education, he habitually wrote and spoke in French; like every lady
and gentleman from Naples to Edinburgh, his life was regulated by the
social conventions of France; like every amateur of letters from Madrid
to St. Petersburg, his whole conception of literary taste, his whole
standard of literary values, was French. To him, as to the vast majority
of his contemporaries, the very essence of civilisation was concentrated
in French literature, and especially in French poetry; and French poetry
meant to him, as to his contemporaries, that particular kind of French
poetry which had come into fashion at the court of Louis XIV. For this
curious creed was as narrow as it was all-pervading. The _Grand Siecle_
was the Church Infallible; and it was heresy to doubt the Gospel of
Boileau.

Frederick's library, still preserved at Potsdam, shows us what
literature meant in those days to a cultivated man: it is composed
entirely of the French Classics, of the works of Voltaire, and of the
masterpieces of antiquity translated into eighteenth-century French. But
Frederick was not content with mere appreciation; he too would create;
he would write alexandrines on the model of Racine, and madrigals after
the manner of Chaulieu; he would press in person into the sacred
sanctuary, and burn incense with his own hands upon the inmost shrine.
It was true that he was a foreigner; it was true that his knowledge of
the French language was incomplete and incorrect; but his sense of his
own ability urged him forward, and his indefatigable pertinacity kept
him at his strange task throughout the whole of his life. He filled
volumes, and the contents of those volumes afford probably the most
complete illustration in literature of the very trite proverb--_Poeta
nascitur, non fit_. The spectacle of that heavy German Muse, with her
feet crammed into pointed slippers, executing, with incredible
conscientiousness, now the stately measure of a Versailles minuet, and
now the spritely steps of a Parisian jig, would be either ludicrous or
pathetic--one hardly knows which--were it not so certainly neither the
one nor the other, but simply dreary with an unutterable dreariness,
from which the eyes of men avert themselves in shuddering dismay.
Frederick himself felt that there was something wrong--something, but
not really very much. All