calls him, and there could not be a better judge, amazed Europe by his
taste for collecting tall soldiers, by his parsimony, his kennel
manners in the treatment of his family and his subjects, and leaves a
name in history as the first, greatest, and the unique collector of
human beings on a Barnumesque scale. All known collectors of birds,
beetles, butterflies, and beasts accord him an easy supremacy, for his
aggregation of colossal grenadiers.

It is temptingly easy to be epigrammatic, perhaps witty, at the
expense of Frederick William I of Prussia. The man, however, who freed
the serfs; who readjusted the taxes; who insisted upon industry and
honesty among his officials; who proclaimed liberty of conscience and
of thought; who first put on, to wear for the rest of his life, the
uniform of his army, and thus made every officer proud to wear the
uniform himself; and who left his son an army of eighty thousand men,
thoroughly equipped and trained, and an overflowing treasury, may not
be dismissed merely with anecdotes of his eccentric brutality.

Only the ignorant and the envious, nibble at the successes of other
men, with vermin teeth and venomous tongue. Those people who can never
praise anything whole-heartedly come by their cautious censure from an
uneasy doubt of their own deserving. The contempt of Frederick William
I for learning and learned men, left him leisure for matters of far
more importance to his kingdom at the time. His habitual roughness to
his son was due, perhaps, to the fact that there was a curious strain
of effeminate culture in the man who deified Voltaire. Poor Voltaire,
who called Shakespeare "le sauvage ivre," or to quote him exactly: "On
croirait que cet ouvrage (Hamlet) est le fruit de l'imagination d'un
sauvage ivre," who said that Dante would never be read, and that the
comedies of Aristophanes were unworthy of presentation in a country
tavern! One is tempted to believe that the father was a man of
robuster judgment in such matters than the son, whose own rather
mediocre literary equipment, made him the easy prey of that acidulous
vestal of literature, Voltaire. However that may be, he left a useful
and unexpected legacy to his son, provided, indeed, the sinews for the
making of a powerful Prussian kingdom.

March the 31st, 1740, this eccentric miser died, to be succeeded by
his son, Frederick II, "the Great," then twenty-eight years old. Here
was a surprise indeed. Of these German kings a