nomy and soldiers. The Queen and
ourselves, too unworthy to open our mouths, listened in humble silence
to the oracles which were pronounced. After dinner the King slept in his
armchair for two hours, and we had to keep as still as mice until he
awoke. Then we read with the Queen. When, at last, the King went to his
tobacco parliament we were free for a little while."

That Frederick and his sister grew up, under this repressive system,
into nothing worse than a pair of neurasthenics seems almost a miracle.

During the eighteenth century there were two distinct types of
history-making men in Germany the Frenchified-German, fond of pageants
and rich raiment, and the rugged, harsh, yet true-hearted, fighting men
of the Dessauer stamp.

The Prince of Anhalt-Dessau was the field-marshal of Frederick William
I. To Dessau the science of warfare owes an enormous debt. When a young
man, this impetuous prince fell in love with the daughter of an
apothecary named Fos. In spite of all obstacles of birth and wealth, he
determined to marry the girl of his choice; and because he was, says
Carlyle, "perhaps the biggest mass of inarticulate human vitality",
certainly, one of the biggest then going about in the world, marry her
he did. In spite of Dessauer's being, to quote Carlyle again, "a very
whirlwind of a man," the marriage was most happy.

During the first half of the eighteenth century French practically
superseded German as the language of polite society. The virile German
language largely owes its rehabilitation to a woman, Luise Gottsched,
wife of Johann Christopher Gottsched, the famous scholar. As usual, fame
has been unjust: the husband has received all the credit, while the wife
did all, or nearly all, of the work. Luise Gottsched was one of the
brightest women of the eighteenth century. She wrote, exceedingly well.
But after her husband began his Dictionary of the German Language and
his Model Grammar, Luise was obliged to do what a clever woman whose
husband writes a dictionary is always obliged to do, drop all her own
literary work to assist him. Morning, noon, and night, year in and year
out, Luise Gottsched toiled at this verbal drudgery; and when she was
sick, worn out at the age of forty-seven, her husband whined, publicly,
because she did not always "answer pleasantly" when he called her from
her invalid's couch to copy his interminable manuscripts. She died at
the age of fifty-nine. One happy time, though, Lui