ike
Banquo's royal procession in the tragedy of Macbeth?

How can I prevent all these arts of royal policy, and all these displays
of royal magnificence? How can I prevent the successor of Frederick the
Great from aspiring to a new, and, in this age, unexampled kind of
glory? Is it in my power to say that he shall not make his confessions
in the style of St. Austin or of Rousseau? that he shall not assume the
character of the penitent and flagellant, and, grafting monkery on
philosophy, strip himself of his regal purple, clothe his gigantic limbs
in the sackcloth and the _hair-shirt_, and exercise on his broad
shoulders the disciplinary scourge of the holy order of the
_Sans-Culottes_? It is not in me to hinder kings from making new orders
of religious and martial knighthood. I am not Hercules enough to uphold
those orbs which the Atlases of the world are so desirous of shifting
from their weary shoulders. What can be done against the magnanimous
resolution of the great to accomplish the degradation and the ruin of
their own character and situation?

What I say of the German princes, that I say of all the other dignities
and all the other institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. If they have a
mind to destroy themselves, they may put their advocates to silence and
their advisers to shame. I have often praised the Aulic Council. It is
very true, I did so. I thought it a tribunal as well formed as human
wisdom could form a tribunal for coercing the great, the rich, and the
powerful,--for obliging them to submit their necks to the imperial laws,
and to those of Nature and of nations: a tribunal well conceived for
extirpating peculation, corruption, and oppression from all the parts of
that vast, heterogeneous mass, called the Germanic body. I should not be
inclined to retract these praises upon any of the ordinary lapses into
which human infirmity will fall; they might still stand, though some of
their _conclusums_ should taste of the prejudices of country or of
faction, whether political or religious. Some degree even of corruption
should not make me think them guilty of suicide; but if we could suppose
that the Aulic Council, not regarding duty or even common decorum,
listening neither to the secret admonitions of conscience nor to the
public voice of fame, some of the members basely abandoning their post,
and others continuing in it only the more infamously to betray it,
should give a judgment so shameless and so prostit