was. They met, one day on the road, a Lord
Hyndford, English Ambassador just returning from Petersburg, with his
fourgons and vehicles, and arrangements for sleep and victual, in an
enviably luxurious condition,--whom we shall meet, to our cost. They
saw, in the body, old Field-marshal Lacy, and dined with him, at Riga;
who advised brandy schnapps; a recipe rejected by Busching. And other
memorabilia, which by accident hang about this Lynar. [Busching,
_Beitrage,_ vi. 132-164.]--All through Regent Anne's time he continued a
dangerous object to Friedrich; and it was a relief when Elizabeth CATIN
became Autocrat, instead of Deshabille Anne and her Lynar. Adieu to him,
for fifteen years or more.

Of Friedrich's military operations, of his magazines, posts, diligent
plannings and gallopings about, in those weeks; of all this the reader
can form some notion by looking on the map and remembering what has gone
before: but that subterranean growling which attended him, prophetic
of Earthquake, that universal breaking forth of Bedlams, now fallen so
extinct, no reader can imagine. Bedlams totally extinct to everybody;
but which were then very real, and raged wide as the world, high as the
stars, to a hideous degree among the then sons of men;--unimaginable now
by any mortal.

And, alas, this is one of the grand difficulties for my readers and me;
Friedrich's Life-element having fallen into such a dismal condition.
Most dismal, dark, ugly, that Austrian-Succession Business, and its
world-wide battlings, throttlings and intriguings: not Dismal Swamp,
under a coverlid of London Fog, could be uglier! A Section of "History"
so called, which human nature shrinks from; of which the extant
generation already knows nothing, and is impatient of hearing anything!
Truly, Oblivion is very due to such an Epoch: and from me far be it to
awaken, beyond need, its sordid Bedlams, happily extinct. But without
Life-element, no Life can be intelligible; and till Friedrich and one or
two others are extricated from it, Dismal Swamp cannot be quite filled
in. Courage, reader!--Our Constitutional Historian makes this farther
reflection:--

"English moneys, desperate Russian intrigues, Treaties made and
Treaties broken--If instead of Pragmatic Sanction with eleven Potentates
guaranteeing, Maria Theresa had at this time had 200,000 soldiers and
a full treasury (as Prince Eugene used to advise the late Kaiser), how
different might it have been with her