iscerned a spirit greater than any other man's....

"If used at all to intercourse with the great world, and possessed of
any elevation of mind, you have no embarrassment in speaking to a King;
but to a Great Man you present yourself not without fear. Friedrich, in
his private sphere, was of sufficiently unequal humor; wayward, wilful;
open to prejudices; indulged in mockery, often enough epigrammatic upon
the French;--agreeable in a high degree to strangers whom he pleased to
favor; but bitterly piquant for those he was prepossessed against, or
who, without knowing it, had ill-chosen the hour of approaching him. To
me, luck was kind in all these points;" my Interview delightful, but not
to be reported farther. [_"Memoires par M. le Comte de Segur_ (Paris,
1826), ii. 133, 120:" cited in PREUSS, iv. 218. For date, see Rodenbeck,
iii. 322, 323.]

Except Mirabeau, about a year after this, Segur is the last
distinguished French visitor. French Correspondence the King has
now little or none. October gone a year, his D'Alembert, the last
intellectual Frenchman he had a real esteem for, died. Paris and France
seem to be sinking into strange depths; less and less worth hearing of.
Now and then a straggling Note from Condorcet, Grimm or the like, are
all he gets there.

That of the Furstenbund put a final check on Joseph's notions of making
the Reich a reality; his reforms and ambitions had thenceforth to
take other directions, and leave the poor old Reich at peace. A mighty
reformer he had been, the greatest of his day. Broke violently in upon
quiescent Austrian routine, on every side: monkeries, school-pedantries,
trade-monopolies, serfages,--all things, military and civil, spiritual
and temporal, he had resolved to make perfect in a minimum of time.
Austria gazed on him, its admiration not unmixed with terror. He rushed
incessantly about; hardy as a Charles Twelfth; slept on his bearskin
on the floor of any inn or hut;--flew at the throat of every Absurdity,
however broad-based or dangerously armed, "Disappear, I say!" Will hurl
you an Official of Rank, where need is, into the Pillory; sets him, in
one actual instance, to permanent sweeping of the streets in Vienna.
A most prompt, severe, and yet beneficent and charitable kind of man.
Immensely ambitious, that must be said withal. A great admirer of
Friedrich; bent to imitate him with profit. "Very clever indeed," says
Friedrich; "but has the fault [a terribly grave one!] o