t from
Mannheim again, to this day.

PRUSSIAN MAJESTY HAS DISPLEASED THE KAISER AND THE KING OF POLAND.

Friedrich Wilhelm's praises from the Protestant public were great, on
this occasion. Nor can we, who lie much farther from it in every sense,
refuse him some grin of approval. Act, and manner of doing the act, are
creditably of a piece with Friedrich Wilhelm; physiognomic of the rugged
veracious man. It is one of several such acts done by him: for it was a
duty apt to recur in Germany, in his day. This duty Friedrich Wilhelm,
a solid Protestant after his sort, and convinced of the "nothingness
and nonsensicality (UNGRUND UND ABSURDITAT) of Papistry," was always
honorably prompt to do. There is an honest bacon-and-greens conscience
in the man; almost the one conscience you can find in any royal man
of that day. Promptly, without tremulous counting of costs, he always
starts up, solid as oak, on the occurrence of such a thing, and says,
"That is unjust; contrary to the Treaty of Westphalia; you will have to
put down that!"--And if words avail not, his plan is always the same:
Clap a similar thumbscrew, pressure equitably calculated, on the
Catholics of Prussia; these can complain to their Popes and Jesuit
Dignitaries: these are under thumbscrew till the Protestant pressure be
removed. Which always did rectify the matter in a little time. One other
of these instances, that of the Salzburg Protestants, the last such
instance, as this of Heidelberg was the first, will by and by claim
notice from us.

It is very observable, how Friedrich Wilhelm, hating quarrels, was ever
ready to turn out for quarrel on such an occasion; though otherwise
conspicuously a King who stayed well at home, looking after his own
affairs; meddling with no neighbor that would be at peace with him. This
properly is Friedrich Wilhelm's "sphere of political activity" among his
contemporaries; this small quasi-domestic sphere, of forbidding injury
to Protestants. A most small sphere, but then a genuine one: nor did he
seek even this, had it not forced itself upon him. And truly we might
ask, What has become of the other more considerable "spheres" in that
epoch? The supremest loud-trumpeting "political activities" which
then filled the world and its newspapers, what has the upshot of
them universally been? Zero, and oblivion; no other. While this poor
Friedrich-Wilhelm sphere is perhaps still a countable quantity. Wise is
he who stays well at