e. The true is well riddled out from amid the false; the
important and essential are alone given us, the unimportant and
superfluous honestly thrown away. A lean wiry veracity (an immense
advantage in any Literature, good or bad!) is everywhere beneficently
observable; the QUALITY of the intellect always extremely good, whatever
its quantity may be.

It is true, his spelling--"ASTEURE" for "A CETTE HEURE"--is very bad.
And as for punctuation, he never could understand the mystery of it; he
merely scatters a few commas and dashes, as if they were shaken out of a
pepper-box upon his page, and so leaves it. These are deficiencies
lying very bare to criticism; and I confess I never could completely
understand them in such a man. He that would have ordered arrest for
the smallest speck of mud on a man's buff-belt, indignant that any
pipe-clayed portion of a man should not be perfectly pipeclayed:
how could he tolerate false spelling, and commas shaken as out of
a pepper-box over his page? It is probable he cared little about
Literature, after all; cared, at least, only about the essentials of it;
had practically no ambition for himself, or none considerable, in
that kind;--and so might reckon exact obedience and punctuality, in a
soldier, more important than good spelling to an amateur literary man:
He never minded snuff upon his own chin, not even upon his waistcoat and
breeches: A merely superficial thing, not worth bothering about, in the
press of real business!--

That Friedrich's Course of Education did on the whole prosper, in spite
of every drawback, is known to all men. He came out of it a man of
clear and ever-improving intelligence; equipped with knowledge, true in
essentials, if not punctiliously exact, upon all manner of practical
and speculative things, to a degree not only unexampled among modern
Sovereign Princes so called, but such as to distinguish him even among
the studious class. Nay many "Men-of-Letters" have made a reputation for
themselves with but a fraction of the real knowledge concerning men and
things, past and present, which Friedrich was possessed of. Already at
the time when action came to be demanded of him, he was what we must
call a well-informed and cultivated man; which character he never ceased
to merit more and more; and as for the action, and the actions,--we
shall see whether he was fit for these or not.

One point of supreme importance in his education was all along made
sure of, b