th, not claiming therein more praise
than the head of any ordinary household, who rules it simply because it
is his place, and he must not yield the mastery of it to another.

How far, in the future, it may be possible for men to gain the strength
necessary for kingship without either fronting death, or inflicting it,
seems to me not at present determinable. The historical facts are that,
broadly speaking, none but soldiers, or persons with a soldierly
faculty, have ever yet shown themselves fit to be kings; and that no
other men are so gentle, so just, or so clear-sighted. Wordsworth's
character of the happy warrior cannot be reached in the height of it
_but by_ a warrior; nay, so much is it beyond common strength that I had
supposed the entire meaning of it to be metaphorical, until one of the
best soldiers of England himself read me the poem,[142] and taught me,
what I might have known, had I enough watched his own life, that it was
entirely literal. There is nothing of so high reach distinctly
demonstrable in Friedrich: but I see more and more, as I grow older,
that the things which are the most worth, encumbered among the errors
and faults of every man's nature, are never clearly demonstrable; and
are often most forcible when they are scarcely distinct to his own
conscience,--how much less, clamorous for recognition by others!

Nothing can be more beautiful than Carlyle's showing of this, to any
careful reader of Friedrich. But careful readers are but one in the
thousand; and by the careless, the masses of detail with which the
historian must deal are insurmountable.

My own notes, made for the special purpose of hunting down the one point
of economy, though they cruelly spoil Carlyle's own current and method
of thought, may yet be useful in enabling readers, unaccustomed to books
involving so vast a range of conception, to discern what, on this one
subject only, may be gathered from that history. On any other subject of
importance, similar gatherings might be made of other passages. The
historian has to deal with all at once.

I therefore have determined to print here, as a sequel to the Essay on
War, my notes from the first volume of Friedrich, on the economies of
Brandenburg, up to the date of the establishment of the Prussian
monarchy. The economies of the first three Kings of Prussia I shall then
take up in _Fors Clavigera_, finding them fitter for examination in
connection with the subject of that book tha