fects save tyranny, ambition, parsimony, dissimulation, and lying.

It was during those ten years of rest and military preparation that
Voltaire made his memorable visit--his third and last--to Potsdam and
Berlin, thirty-two months of alternate triumph and humiliation. No
literary man ever had so successful and brilliant a career as this
fortunate and lauded Frenchman,--the oracle of all salons, the arbiter
of literary fashions, a dictator in the realm of letters, with amazing
fecundity of genius directed into all fields of labor; poet, historian,
dramatist, and philosopher; writing books enough to load a cart, and all
of them admired and extolled, all of them scattered over Europe, read by
all nations; a marvellous worker, of unbounded wit and unexampled
popularity, whose greatest literary merit was in the transcendent
excellence of his style, for which chiefly he is immortal; a great
artist, rather than an original and profound genius whose ideas form the
basis of civilizations. The King of Prussia formed an ardent friendship
for this king of letters, based on admiration rather than respect;
invited him to his court, extolled and honored him, and lavished on him
all that he could bestow, outside of political distinction. But no
worldly friendship could stand such a test as both were subjected to,
since they at last comprehended each other's character and designs.
Voltaire perceived the tyranny, the ambition, the heartlessness, the
egotism, and the exactions of his royal patron, and despised him while
he flattered him; and Frederic on his part saw the hollowness, the
meanness, the suspicion, the irritability, the pride, the insincerity,
the tricks, the ingratitude, the baseness, the lies of his
distinguished guest,--and their friendship ended in utter vanity. What
friendship can last without mutual respect? The friendship of Frederic
and Voltaire was hopelessly broken, in spite of the remembrance of
mutual admiration and happy hours. It was patched up and mended like a
broken vase, but it could not be restored. How sad, how mournful, how
humiliating is a broken friendship or an alienated love! It is the
falling away of the foundations of the soul, the disappearance forever
of what is most to be prized on earth,--its celestial certitudes. A
beloved friend may die, but we are consoled in view of the fact that the
friendship may be continued in heaven: the friend is not lost to us. But
when a friendship or a love is broken