hosphorescents his nitres and charcoals well apart; to get out of
these English what they were capable of giving him, namely, heavy
strokes,--and never ask them for what they had not: them or the others;
but treat each according to his kind. Just, candid, consummately
polite: an excellent manager of men, as well as of war-movements, though
Voltaire found him shockingly defective in ESPRIT. The English, I think,
he generally quartered by themselves; employed them oftenest under the
Hereditary Prince,--a man of swift execution and prone to strokes like
themselves. "Oftenest under the Erbprinz," says Mauvillon: "till, after
the Fight of Kloster Kampen, it began to be noticed that there was a
change in that respect; and the mess-rooms whispered, 'By accident or
not?'"--which shall remain mysterious to me. In Battle after Battle he
got the most unexceptionable sabring and charging from Lord Granby and
the difficult English element; and never was the least discord heard
in his Camp;--nor could even Sackville at Minden tempt him into a loud
word.

But enough of English soldiering, and battling with the French. For
about two months prior to this of Vellinghausen, and for more than two
months after, there is going on, by special Envoys between Pitt and
Choiseul, a lively Peace-Negotiation, which is of more concernment to
us than any Battle. "Congress at Augsburg" split upon formalities,
preliminaries, and never even tried to meet: but France and England are
actually busy. Each Country has sent its Envoy: the Sieur de Bussy, a
tricky gentleman, known here of old, is Choiseul's, whom Pitt is on his
guard against; "Mr. Hans Stanley," a lively, clear-sighted person, of
whom I could never hear elsewhere, is Pitt's at Paris: and it is in
that City between Choiseul and Stanley, with Pitt warily and loftily
presiding in the distance, that the main stress of the Negotiation lies.
Pitt is lofty, haughty, but very fine and noble; no King or Kaiser
could be more. Sincere, severe, though most soft-shining; high, earnest,
steady, like the stars. Artful Choiseul, again, flashes out in a
cheerily exuberant way; and Stanley's Despatches about Choiseul ("CE FOU
PLEIN D'ESPRIT," as Friedrich once christens him), about Choiseul and
the France then round him, and the effects of Vellinghausen in society
and the like,--are the liveliest reading one almost anywhere meets with
in that kind. [In THACKERAY, i. 505-579, and especially ii. 520-626, is
the S