the question is, how to group them with skill, so that
the necessary elements may converge at the right moment, and one shot
kill three or four birds. This is Friedrich's fine way, perceptible in
all these Journeys. The French friends, flying each on his own track,
with his own load of impediments, Voltaire with his Madame for instance,
are a difficult element in such problem; and there has been, and
is, much scheming and corresponding about it, within the last month
especially.

Voltaire is now at Brussels, with his Du Chatelet, prosecuting that
endless "lawsuit with the House of Honsbruck,"--which he, and we, are
both desirous to have done with. He is at the Hague, too, now and then;
printing, about to print, the ANTI-MACHIAVEL; corresponding, to right
and left, quarrelling with Van Duren the Printer; lives, while there, in
the VIEILLE COUR, in the vast dusky rooms with faded gilding, and grand
old Bookshelves "with the biggest spider-webs in Europe." Brussels is
his place for Law-Consultations, general family residence; the Hague and
that old spider-web Palace for correcting Proof-sheets; doing one's own
private studies, which we never quite neglect. Fain would Friedrich
see him, fain he Friedrich; but there is a divine Emilie, there is a
Maupertuis, there are--In short, never were such difficulties, in the
cooking of an egg with water boiling; and much vain correspondence
has already been on that subject, as on others equally extinct.
Correspondence which is not pleasant reading at this time; the rather
as no reader can, without endless searching, even understand it.
Correspondence left to us, not in the cosmic, elucidated or legible
state; left mainly as the Editorial rubbish-wagons chose to shoot it;
like a tumbled quarry, like the ruins of a sacked city;--avoidable by
readers who are not forced into it! [Herr Preuss's edition (_OEuvres
de Frederic,_ vols. xxi. xxii. xxiii.) has come out since the above
was written: it is agreeably exceptional; being, for the first time,
correctly printed, and the editor himself having mostly understood
it,--though the reader still cannot, on the terms there allowed.]
Take the following select bricks as sample, which are of some use; the
general Heading is,

KING FRIEDERIC TO M. DE VOLTAIRE (at the Hague, or at Brussels).

"CHARLOTTENBURG, 12th JUNE, 1740.--... My dear Voltaire, resist no
longer the eagerness I have to see you. Do in my favor whatever your
humanity allows. In