's day, 1412, he first set foot in his town, "and Brandenburg, under
its wise Kurfuerst, begins to be cosmic again." The story of Heavy Peg,
pages 195-198 (138, 140), is one of the most brilliant and important
passages of the first volume; page 199, specially to our purpose, must
be given entire:--

The offer to be Kaiser was made him in his old days; but he
wisely declined that too. It was in Brandenburg, by what he
silently founded there, that he did his chief benefit to
Germany and mankind. He understood the noble art of
governing men; had in him the justness, clearness, valor,
and patience needed for that. A man of sterling probity, for
one thing. _Which indeed is the first requisite in said
art_:--if you will have your laws obeyed without mutiny, see
well that they be pieces of God Almighty's law; otherwise
all the artillery in the world will not keep down mutiny.

Friedrich "travelled much over Brandenburg;" looking into
everything with his own eyes; making, I can well fancy,
innumerable crooked things straight; reducing more and more
that famishing dog-kennel of a Brandenburg into a fruitful
arable field. His portraits represent a square-headed,
mild-looking, solid gentleman, with a certain twinkle of
mirth in the serious eyes of him. Except in those Hussite
wars for Kaiser Sigismund and the Reich, in which no man
could prosper, he may be defined as constantly prosperous.
To Brandenburg he was, very literally, the blessing of
blessings; redemption out of death into life. In the ruins
of that old Friesack Castle, battered down by Heavy Peg,
antiquarian science (if it had any eyes) might look for the
taproot of the Prussian nation, and the beginning of all
that Brandenburg has since grown to under the sun.

Which growth is now traced by Carlyle in its various budding and
withering, under the succession of the twelve Electors, of whom
Friedrich, with his heavy Peg, is first, and Friedrich, first King of
Prussia, grandfather of Friedrich the Great, the twelfth.

XI.

1416-1701.--_Brandenburg under the Hohenzollern Kurfuersts._

Book III.

Who the Hohenzollerns were, and how they came to power in Nueremberg, is
told in Chap. v. of Book II.

Their succession in Brandenburg is given in brief at page 377 (269). I
copy it, in absolute barrenness of enumeration, for our momentary
conven