dull,
frivolous, and unrespected old age. Without one qualification for
military command, except that personal courage which was common between
him and the whole nobility of France, he had been placed at the head of
the army of Hanover; and in that situation he did his best to repair, by
extortion and corruption, the injury which he had done to his property
by a life of dissolute profusion.

The Duke of Richelieu to the end of his life hated the philosophers as a
sect, not for those parts of their system which a good and wise man
would have condemned, but for their virtues, for their spirit of free
inquiry, and for their hatred of those social abuses of which he was
himself the personification. But he, like many of those who thought with
him, excepted Voltaire from the list of proscribed writers. He
frequently sent flattering letters to Ferney. He did the patriarch the
honor to borrow money of him, and even carried this condescending
friendship so far as to forget to pay the interest. Voltaire thought
that it might be in his power to bring the Duke and the King of Prussia
into communication with each other. He wrote earnestly to both; and he
so far succeeded that a correspondence between them was commenced.

But it was to very different means that Frederic was to owe his
deliverance. At the beginning of November, the net seemed to have closed
completely round him. The Russians were in the field, and were spreading
devastation through his eastern provinces. Silesia was overrun by the
Austrians. A great French army was advancing from the West under the
command of Marshal Soubise, a prince of the great Armorican House of
Rohan. Berlin itself had been taken and plundered by the Croatians. Such
was the situation from which Frederic extricated himself, with dazzling
glory, in the short space of thirty days.

He marched first against Soubise. On the fifth of November the armies
met at Rosbach. The French were two to one; but they were ill
disciplined, and their general was a dunce. The tactics of Frederic, and
the well-regulated valor of the Prussian troops, obtained a complete
victory. Seven thousand of the invaders were made prisoners. Their guns,
their colors, their baggage, fell into the hands of the conquerors.
Those who escaped fled as confusedly as a mob scattered by cavalry.
Victorious in the West, the King turned his arms towards Silesia. In
that quarter everything seemed to be lost. Breslau had fallen; and
Charles