he old
King again rose on him, and stept into his Poem; and his Faust got
transformed into an unresting, creating, pitilessly exacting Master,
forcing on his salutiferous drains and fruitful canals through the
morasses of the Weichsel." [G. Freytag, _Neue Bilder aus dem Leben des
deutschen Volkes_ (Leipzig, 1862), pp. 397-408.]

These statements and pencillings of Freytag, apart from here and there
a flourish of poetic sentiment, I believe my readers can accept as
essentially true, and a correct portrait of the fact. And therewith, CON
LA BOCCA DOLCE, we will rise from this Supper of Horrors. That Friedrich
fortified the Country, that he built an impregnable Graudentz, and two
other Fortresses, rendering the Country, and himself on that Eastern
side, impregnable henceforth, all readers can believe. Friedrich has
been building various Fortresses in this interim, though we have taken
no notice of them; building and repairing many things;--trimming up his
Military quite to the old pitch, as the most particular thing of all. He
has his new Silesian Fortress of Silberberg,--big Fortress, looking
into certain dangerous Bohemian Doors (in Tobias Stusche's Country,
if readers recollect an old adventure now mythical);--his new Silesian
Silberberg, his newer Polish Graudentz, and many others, and flatters
himself he is not now pregnable on any side.

A Friedrich working, all along, in Poland especially, amid what
circumambient deluges of maledictory outcries, and mendacious
shriekeries from an ill-informed Public, is not now worth mentioning.
Mere distracted rumors of the Pamphleteer and Newspaper kind: which,
after hunting them a long time, through dense and rare, end mostly in
zero, and angry darkness of some poor human brain,--or even testify in
favor of this Head-Worker, and of the sense he shows, especially of the
patience. For example: that of the "Polish Towns and Villages, ordered"
by this Tyrant "to deliver, each of them, so many marriageable girls;
each girl to bring with her as dowry, furnished by her parents,
1 feather-bed, 4 pillows, 1 cow, 3 swine and 3 ducats,"--in which
desirable condition this tyrannous King "sent her into the Brandenburg
States to be wedded and promote population." [Lindsey, LETTERS ON POLAND
(Letter 2d). p. 61: Peyssonnel (in some. French Book of his, "solemnly
presented to Louis XVI. and the Constituent Assembly;" cited in PREUSS,
iv. 85); &c. &c.] Feather-beds, swine and ducats had their val