pricious
friend, and a selfish self-idolater. While he was the friend of literary
men, he patronized those who were infidel in their creed. He was not a
religious persecutor, because he regarded all religions as equally false
and equally useful. He was social among convivial and learned friends,
but cared little for women or female society. His latter years, though
dignified and quiet, an idol in all military circles, with an immense
fame, and surrounded with every pleasure and luxury at Sans-Souci, were
still sad and gloomy, like those of most great men whose leading
principle of life was vanity and egotism,--like those of Solomon,
Charles V., and Louis XIV. He heard the distant rumblings, if he did not
live to see the lurid fires, of the French Revolution. He had been
deceived in Voltaire, but he could not mistake the logical sequence of
the ideas of Rousseau,--those blasting ideas which would sweep away all
feudal institutions and all irresponsible tyrannies. When Mirabeau
visited him he was a quaking, suspicious, irritable, capricious, unhappy
old man, though adored by his soldiers to the last,--for those were the
only people he ever loved, those who were willing to die for him, those
who built up his throne: and when he died, I suppose he was sincerely
lamented by his army and his generals and his nobility, for with him
began the greatness of Prussia as a military power. So far as a life
devoted to the military and political aggrandizement of a country makes
a man a patriot, Frederic the Great will receive the plaudits of those
men who worship success, and who forget the enormity of unscrupulous
crimes in the outward glory which immediately resulted,--yea, possibly
of contemplative statesmen who see in the rise of a new power an
instrument of the Almighty for some inscrutable end. To me his character
and deeds have no fascination, any more than the fortunate career of
some one of our modern millionnaires would have to one who took no
interest in finance. It was doubtless grateful to the dying King of
Prussia to hear the plaudits of his idolaters, as he stood on the hither
shores of eternity; but his view of the spectators as they lined those
shores must have been soon lost sight of, and their cheering and
triumphant voices unheard and disregarded, as the bark, in which he
sailed alone, put forth on the unknown ocean, to meet the Eternal Judge
of the living and the dead.

We leave now the man who won so great a fame