diator on the arena
of a pagan amphitheatre, but more like a Judas Maccabaeus, when hunted
by the Syrian hosts, rising victorious, and laying the foundation of a
powerful monarchy; indeed, his fame spread, irrespective of his cause
and character, from one end of Christendom to the other,--not such a
fame as endeared Gustavus Adolphus to the heart of nations for heroic
efforts to save the Protestant religion,--but such a fame as the
successful generals of ancient Rome won by adding territories to a
warlike State, regardless of all the principles of right and wrong. Such
a career is suggestive of grand moral lessons; and it is to teach these
lessons that I describe a character for whom I confess I feel but little
sympathy, yet whom I am compelled to respect for his heroic qualities
and great abilities.

Frederic of Prussia was born in 1712, and had an unhappy childhood and
youth from the caprices of a royal but disagreeable father, best known
for his tall regiment of guards; a severe, austere, prejudiced, formal,
narrow, and hypochondriacal old Pharisee, whose sole redeeming
excellence was an avowed belief in God Almighty and in the orthodox
doctrines of the Protestant Church.

In 1740, this rigid, exacting, unsympathetic king died; and his son
Frederic, who had been subjected to the severest discipline, restraints,
annoyances, and humiliations, ascended the throne, and became the third
King of Prussia, at the age of twenty-eight. His kingdom was a small
one, being then about one quarter of its present size.

And here we pause for a moment to give a glance at the age in which he
lived,--an age of great reactions, when the stirring themes and issues
of the seventeenth century were substituted for mockeries, levities,
and infidelities; when no fierce protests were made except those of
Voltaire against the Jesuits; when an abandoned woman ruled France, as
the mistress of an enervated monarch; when Spain and Italy were sunk in
lethargic forgetfulness, Austria was priest-ridden, and England was
governed by a ring of selfish lauded proprietors; when there was no
marked enterprise but the slave-trade; when no department of literature
or science was adorned by original genius; and when England had no
broader statesman than Walpole, no abler churchman than Warburton, no
greater poet than Pope. There was a general indifference to lofty
speculation. A materialistic philosophy was in fashion,--not openly
atheistic, but arrogant an