,
to be undergone for such an object. He watched over it like an Argus,
with eyes that reached everywhere. Discipline shall be as exact as
Euclid;--short of perfection we do not stop! Discipline and ever better
discipline; enforcement of the rule in all points, improvement of the
rule itself where possible, were the great Drill-sergeant's continual
care. Daily had some loop fallen, which might have gone ravelling far
enough; but daily was he there to pick it up again, and keep the web
unrent and solidly progressive.

We said, it was the "poetic ideal" of Friedrich Wilhelm; who is a dumb
poet in several particulars,--and requires the privileges of genius
from those that READ his dumb poem. It must be owned he rises into the
fantastic here and there; and has crotchets of ultraperfection for his
Army, which are not rational at all. Crotchets that grew ever madder,
the farther he followed them. This Lifeguard Regiment of foot, for
instance, in which the Crown-Prince now is,--Friedrich Wilhelm got it
in his Father's time, no doubt a regiment then of fair qualities; and he
has kept drilling it, improving it, as poets polish stanzas, unweariedly
ever since:--and see now what it has grown to! A Potsdam Giant Regiment,
such as the world never saw, before or since. Three Battalions of
them,--two always here at Potsdam doing formal lifeguard duty, the third
at Brandenburg on drill; 800 to the Battalion,--2,400 sons of Anak in
all. Sublime enough, hugely perfect to the royal eye, such a mass
of shining giants, in their long-drawn regularities and mathematical
manoeuvrings,--like some streak of Promethean lightning, realized here
at last, in the vulgar dusk of things!

Truly they are men supreme in discipline, in beauty of equipment; and
the shortest man of them rises, I think, towards seven feet, some are
nearly nine feet high. Men from all countries; a hundred and odd come
annually, as we saw, from Russia,--a very precious windfall: the rest
have been collected, crimped, purchased out of every European country,
at enormous expense, not to speak of other trouble to his Majesty. James
Kirkman, an Irish recruit of good inches, cost him 1,200 pounds before
he could be got inveigled, shipped and brought safe to hand. The
documents are yet in existence; [Forster, _Handbuch der Geschichte,
Geographie und Statistik des Preussischen Reichs_ (Berlin, 1820), iv.
130, 132;--not in a very lucid state.] and the Portrait of this Irish
fellow-c