ds mere oblivion from us. He was a spirited man;
did soldierings, fine Siege of Bonn (July-October, 1689), sieges
and campaignings, in person,--valiant in action, royal especially
in patience there,--during that Third War of Louis-Fourteenth's,
the Treaty-of-Ryswick one. All through the Fourth, or Spanish
Succession-War, his Prussian Ten-Thousand, led by fit generals, showed
eminently what stuff they were made of. Witness Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau
(still a YOUNG Dessauer) on the field of Blenheim;--Leopold had the
right wing there, and saved Prince Eugene who was otherwise blown to
pieces, while Marlborough stormed and conquered on the left. Witness the
same Dessauer on the field of Hochstadt the year before, [Varnhagen von
Ense, _Biographische Denkmale_ (Berlin, 1845), ii, 155.] how he managed
the retreat there. Or see him at the Bridge of Cassano (1705); in
the Lines of Turin (1706); [_ Des weltheruhnden Furstens Leopoldi
von Anhult-Dessau Leben und Thaten_ (Leipzig, 1742, anonymous, by one
MICHAEL RANFFT), pp. 53, 61.] wherever hot service was on hand. At
Malplaquet, in those murderous inexpugnable French Lines, bloodiest of
obstinate Fights (upwards of thirty thousand left on the ground), the
Prussians brag that it was they who picked their way through a certain
peat-bog, reckoned impassable; and got fairly in upon the French
wing,--to the huge comfort of Marlborough, and little Eugene his brisk
comrade on that occasion. Marlborough knew well the worth of these
Prussian troops, and also how to stroke his Majesty into continuing them
in the field.

He was an expensive King, surrounded by cabals, by Wartenbergs male and
female, by whirlpools of intrigues, which, now that the game is over,
become very forgettable. But one finds he was a strictly honorable man;
with a certain height and generosity of mind, capable of other nobleness
than the upholstery kind. He had what we may call a hard life of it;
did and suffered a good deal in his day and generation, not at all in
a dishonest or unmanful manner. In fact, he is quite recognizably a
Hohenzollern,--with his back half broken. Readers recollect that sad
accident: how the Nurse, in one of those headlong journeys which his
Father and Mother were always making, let the poor child fall or jerk
backward; and spoiled him much, and indeed was thought to have killed
him, by that piece of inattention. He was not yet Hereditary Prince, he
was only second son: but the elder died; a