nd princes in their
small dominions it has been written: "And these magnates all aped
Louis XIV as their model. They built huge palaces, as like Versailles
as their means would permit, and generally beyond those limits, with
fountains and avenues and dismally wide paths. Even in our own day a
German monarch has left, fortunately unfinished, an accurate
Versailles on a damp island in a Bavarian lake. In those grandiose
structures they cherished a blighting etiquette, and led lives as dull
as those of the aged and torpid carp in their own stew-ponds. Then, at
the proper season, they would break away into the forest and kill
game. Moreover, still in imitation of their model, they held, as a
necessary feature in the dreary drama of their existence, ponderous
dalliances with unattractive mistresses, in whom they fondly tried to
discern the charms of a Montespan or a La Valliere. This monotonous
programme, sometimes varied by a violent contest whether they should
occupy a seat with or without a back, or with or without arms,
represented the even tenor of their lives."

This good stock was evidently lying fallow, and humanity is neither
dignified nor pleasant in the part of fertilizer. Frederick the Great,
it should be remembered, was a Prussian and for Prussia only. He cared
no more about a united Germany than we care for a united America to
include Canada, Mexico, and the Argentine. He cared no more for
Bavarians and Saxons than for Swedes and Frenchmen, and, as we know,
he was utterly contemptuous of German literature or the German
language. He redeemed the shallowness and the torpidity of those other
mediocre rulers by resisting, and resisting successfully, for what
must have been to him seven very long years, the whole force of
Austria and some of the lesser German powers, with the armies of
Russia and France back of them.

He had a turbulent home life; his father on one occasion even
attempted to hang him with his own hands with the cords of the window
curtains, and when he fled from home he captured him and proposed to
put him to death as a deserter, and only the intervention of the Kings
of Poland and Sweden and the Emperor of Germany prevented it. His
accomplice, however, was summarily and mercilessly put to death before
his eyes. There is no illustration in all history, of such a
successful outcome of the rod theory in education, as this of
Frederick the Great. The father put into practice what Wesley
preached: "B