e Phryxus;
but must ride under his belly. Read also this, presently following:

Shortly after which, Friedrich Wilhelm, who had shone much
in the battle of Warsaw, into which he was dragged against
his will, changed sides. An inconsistent, treacherous man?
Perhaps not, O reader! perhaps a man advancing "in
circuits," the only way he has; spirally, face now to east,
now to west, with his own reasonable private aim sun-clear
to him all the while?

The battle of Warsaw, three days long, fought with Gustavus, the
grandfather of Charles XII., against the Poles, virtually ends the
Polish power:

Old Johann Casimir, not long after that peace of Oliva,
getting tired of his unruly Polish chivalry and their ways,
abdicated--retired to Paris, and "and lived much with Ninon
de l'Enclos and her circle," for the rest of his life. He
used to complain of his Polish chivalry, that there was no
solidity in them; nothing but outside glitter, with tumult
and anarchic noise; fatal want of one essential talent, _the
talent of obeying_; and has been heard to prophesy that a
glorious Republic, persisting in such courses, would arrive
at results which would surprise it.

Onward from this time, Friedrich Wilhelm figures in the
world; public men watching his procedure; kings anxious to
secure him--Dutch print-sellers sticking up his portraits
for a hero-worshipping public. Fighting hero, had the public
known it, was not his essential character, though he had to
fight a great deal. He was essentially an industrial man;
great in organizing, regulating, in constraining chaotic
heaps to become cosmic for him. He drains bogs, settles
colonies in the waste places of his dominions, cuts canals;
unweariedly encourages trade and work. The Friedrich
Wilhelm's Canal, which still carries tonnage from the Oder
to the Spree, is a monument of his zeal in this way;
creditable with the means he had. To the poor French
Protestants in the Edict-of-Nantes affair, he was like an
express benefit of Heaven; one helper appointed to whom the
help itself was profitable. He munificently welcomed them
to Brandenburg; showed really a noble piety and human pity,
as well as judgment; nor did Brandenburg and he want their
reward. Some twenty thousand nimble French souls, evidently
of the