efore him, as if a tiger had broken loose from a menagerie. If he
met a lady in the street, he gave her a kick, and told her to go home
and mind her brats. If he saw a clergyman staring at the soldiers, he
admonished the reverend gentleman to betake himself to study and prayer,
and enforced this pious advice by a sound caning, administered on the
spot. But it was in his own house that he was most unreasonable and
ferocious. His palace was hell, and he the most execrable of fiends, a
cross between Moloch and Puck. His son Frederic and his daughter
Wilhelmina, afterwards Margravine of Baireuth, were in an especial
manner objects of his aversion. His own mind was uncultivated. He
despised literature. He hated infidels, papists, and metaphysicians, and
did not very well understand in what they differed from each other. The
business of life, according to him, was to drill and to be drilled. The
recreations suited to a prince were to sit in a cloud of tobacco smoke,
to sip Swedish beer between the puffs of the pipe, to play backgammon
for three half-pence a rubber, to kill wild hogs, and to shoot
partridges by the thousand. The Prince Royal showed little inclination
either for the serious employments or for the amusements of his father.
He shirked the duties of the parade; he detested the fume of tobacco; he
had no taste either for backgammon or for field sports. He had an
exquisite ear, and performed skilfully on the flute. His earliest
instructors had been French refugees, and they had awakened in him a
strong passion for French literature and French society. Frederic
William regarded these tastes as effeminate and contemptible, and, by
abuse and persecution, made them still stronger. Things became worse
when the Prince Royal attained that time of life at which the great
revolution in the human mind and body takes place. He was guilty of some
youthful indiscretions, which no good and wise parent would regard with
severity. At a later period he was accused, truly or falsely, of vices
from which History averts her eyes, and which even Satire blushes to
name, vices such that, to borrow the energetic language of Lord Keeper
Coventry, "the depraved nature of man, which of itself carrieth man to
all other sin, abhorreth them." But the offences of his youth were not
characterized by any peculiar turpitude. They excited, however,
transports of rage in the King, who hated all faults except those to
which he was himself inclined, and w