opera-glass."

"RUPPIN, 20th OCTOBER, 1737. The Prince of Mirow was with us last
Friday; and babbled much in his high way; among other things, white-lied
to us, that the Kaiserinn gave him a certain porcelain snuff-box he was
handling; but on being questioned more tightly, he confessed to me he
had bought it in Vienna." [_Briefe an Vater,_ p. 71 (CARET in _OEuvres_
); pp. 85-114.--See Ib. 6th November, 1737, for faint trace of a visit;
and 25th September, 1739, for another still fainter, the last there is.]

And so let him somnambulate yonder, till the two Queens, like winged
Psyches, one after the other, manage to emerge from him.

Friedrich's Letters to his Father are described by some Prussian Editors
as "very attractive, SEHR ANZIEHENDE BRIEFE;" which, to a Foreign
reader, seems a strange account of them. Letters very hard to understand
completely; and rather insignificant when understood. They turn on Gifts
sent to and sent from, "swans," "hams," with the unspeakable thanks for
them; on recruits of so many inches; on the visitors that have been;
they assure us that "there is no sickness in the regiment," or tell
expressly how much:--wholly small facts; nothing of speculation, and of
ceremonial pipe-clay a great deal. We know already under what
nightmare conditions Friedrich wrote to his Father! The attitude of the
Crown-Prince, sincerely reverent and filial, though obliged to appear
ineffably so, and on the whole struggling under such mountains of
encumbrance, yet loyally maintaining his equilibrium, does at last
acquire, in these Letters, silently a kind of beauty to the best class
of readers. But that is nearly their sole merit. By far the most human
of them, that on the first visit to Mirow, the reader has now seen;
and may thank us much that we show him no more of them. [_Friedrich
des Grossen Briefe an seinen Vater_ (Berlin, 1838)]. Reduced in size,
by suitable omissions; and properly spelt; but with little other
elucidation for a stranger: in _OEuvres,_ xxvii. part 3d, pp, 1-123
(Berlin, 1856).

Chapter IV. -- NEWS OF THE DAY.

While these Mirow visits are about their best, and much else at
Reinsberg is in comfortable progress, Friedrich's first year there just
ending, there come accounts from England of quarrels broken out between
the Britannic Majesty and his Prince of Wales. Discrepancies risen now
to a height; and getting into the very Newspapers;--the Rising Sun too
little under the control of