apprehensive turn! Surely no young
man of twenty-nine more needed all the human qualities than
Friedrich now. The threatenings, the seductions, big Belleisle
hallucinations,--the perils to you infinite, if you MISS the road.
Friedrich did not miss it, as is well known; he managed to pick it out
from that enormous jumble of the elements, and victoriously arrived by
it, he alone of them all. Which is evidence of silent or latent faculty
in him, still more wonderful than the loud-resounding ones of which the
world has heard. Probably there was not, in his history, any chapter
more significant of human faculty than this, which is not on record at
all.

Chapter III. -- GRAND REVIEW AT STREHLEN: NEIPPERG TAKES AIM AT BRESLAU,
BUT ANOTHER HITS IT.

A day or two before that famous Audience of Hyndford and Robinson's,
Neipperg had quitted his impregnable Camp at Neisse, and taken the
field again; in the hope of perhaps helping Robinson's Negotiation by an
inverse method. Should Robinson's offers not prove attractive enough,
as is to be feared, a push from behind may have good effects.
Neipperg intends to have a stroke on Breslau; to twitch Breslau out of
Friedrich's hands, by a private manoeuvre on new resources that have
offered themselves. [_ Helden-Geschichte,_ i. 982, and ii. 227.]

In Breslau, which is by great majority Protestant in creed and warmly
Prussian in temper, there has been no oppression or unfair usage heard
of to any class of persons; and certainly in the matter of Protestant
and Catholic, there has been perfect equality observed. True, the change
from favor and ascendency to mere equality, is not in itself welcome to
human creatures:--one conceives, for various reasons of lower and higher
nature, a minority of discontented individuals in Breslau, zealous for
their creed and old perquisites sacred and profane; who long in secret,
sometimes vocally to one another, for the good old times,--when souls
were not liable to perish wholesale, and people guilty only of loyalty
and orthodoxy to be turned out of their offices on suspicion. Friedrich
says, it was mainly certain zealous Old Ladies of Quality who went into
this adventure; and from whispering to one another, got into speaking,
into meeting in one another's houses for the purpose of concerting
and contriving. [_OEuvres,_ ii. 82, 83.] Zealous Old Ladies
of Quality,--these we consider were the Talking-Apparatus or
Secret-Parliament of the thing: but it