,
though a small one.

Incident SECOND is of slightly more significance; and intimates, not
being quite alone in its kind, a questionable habit or method the
Crown-Prince must have had of dealing with Clerical Persons hereabouts
when they proved troublesome. Here are no fewer than three such Persons,
or Parsons, of the Ruppin Country, who got mischief by him. How the
first gave offence shall be seen, and how he was punished: offences
of the second and the third we can only guess to have been perhaps
pulpit-rebukes of said punishments: perhaps general preaching against
military levities, want of piety, nay open sinfulness, in thoughtless
young men with cockades. Whereby the thoughtless young men were again
driven to think of nocturnal charivari? We will give the story in Dr.
Busching's own words, who looks before and after to great distances,
in a way worth attending to. The Herr Doctor, an endless Collector and
Compiler on all manner of subjects, is very authentic always, and does
not want for natural sense: but he is also very crude,--and here and
there not far from stupid, such his continual haste, and slobbery
manner of working up those Hundred and odd Volumes of his:--[See his
Autobiography, which forms _Beitrage,_ B. vi. (the biggest and last
volume).]

"The sanguine-choleric temperament of Friedrich," says this Doctor,
"drove him, in his youth, to sensual enjoyments and wild amusements of
different kinds; in his middle age, to fiery enterprises; and in his old
years to decisions and actions of a rigorous and vehement nature; yet
so that the primary form of utterance, as seen in his youth, never
altogether ceased with him. There are people still among us (1788) who
have had, in their own experience, knowledge of his youthful pranks;
and yet more are living, who know that he himself, at table, would gayly
recount what merry strokes were done by him, or by his order, in those
young years. To give an instance or two.

"While he was at Neu-Ruppin as Colonel of the Infantry Regiment
there, the Chaplain of it sometimes waited upon him about the time of
dinner,--having been used to dine occasionally with the former Colonel.
The Crown-Prince, however, put him always off, did not ask him to
dinner; spoke contemptuously of him in presence of the Officers. The
Chaplain was so inconsiderate, he took to girding at the Crown-Prince
in his sermons. 'Once on a time,' preached he, one day, 'there was Herod
who had Herodias to d