privilege,--for we are not a Coiner,
we are a King reduced to suspend Cash-payments, for the time being],
Friedrich poured out over all Germany, in all manner of kinds, huge
quantities of bad Coin. This, so long as it would last, is more and
more a copious fountain of supply. This, for the first time, has had to
appear as an item in War-Budget 1759: and it fails in no following,
but expands more and more. It was done through Ephraim, the not lovely
Berlin Jew, whom we used to hear of in Voltaire's time;--through Ephraim
and two others, Ephraim as President: in return for a net Sum, these
shall have privilege to coin such and such amounts, so and so alloyed;
shall pay to General Tauentzien, Army Treasurer, at fixed terms, the
Sums specified: 'Go, and do it; our Mint-Officers sharply watching you;
Mint-Officers, and General Tauentzien [with a young Herr Lessing, as
his Chief Clerk, of whom the King knows nothing]; Go, ye unlovely!' And
Ephraim and Company are making a great deal of money by the unlovely
job. Ephraim is the pair of tongs, the hand, and the unlovely job, are a
royal man's. Alas, yes. And none of us knows better than King Friedrich,
perhaps few of us as well, how little lovely a job it was; how
shockingly UNkingly it was,--though a practice not unknown to German
Kings and Kinglets before his time, and since down almost to ours. [In
STENZEL (v. 141) enumeration of eight or nine unhappy Potentates, who
were busy with it in those same years.] In fact, these are all unkingly
practices;--and the English Subsidy itself is distasteful to a proud
Friedrich: but what, in those circumstances, can any Friedrich do?

"The first coinages of Ephraim had, it seems, in them about 3-7ths of
copper; something less than the half, and more than the third,"--your
gold sovereign grown to be worth 28s. 6d. "But yearly it grew worse; and
in 1762 [English Subsidy having failed] matters had got inverted;
and there was three times as much copper as silver. Commerce, as was
natural, went rocking and tossing, as on a sea under earthquakes; but
there was always ready money among Friedrich's soldiers, as among no
other: nor did the common people, or retail purchasers, suffer by it.
'Hah, an Ephraimite!' they would say, grinning not ill-humoredly, at
sight of one of these pieces; some of which they had more specifically
named 'BLUE-GOWNS' [owing to a tint of blue perceivable, in spite of
the industrious plating in real silver, or at least