Yes, your Majesty, it is a Prince-Royal wise to recognize your Majesty's rough wisdom, on all manner of points; will not be a Devil's-FRIEND, I think, any more than your Majesty was. Here truly are rare talents; like your Majesty and unlike;-- and has a steady swiftness in him, as of an eagle, over and above! Such powers of practical judgment, of skilful action, are rare in one's twenty-third year. And still rarer, have readers noted what a power of holding his peace this young man has? Fruit of his sufferings, of the hard life he has had. Most important power; under which all other useful ones will more and more ripen for him. This Prince already knows his own mind, on a good many points; privately, amid the world's vague clamor jargoning round him to no purpose, he is capable of having HIS mind made up into definite Yes and No,--so as will surprise us one day.
Friedrich Wilhelm, we perceive, [His Letter, 24th October, 1735. (Ib. p. 99).] was in a high degree content with this performance of the Prussian Mission: a very great comfort to his sick mind, in those months and afterwards. Here are talents, here are qualities, --visibly the Friedrich-Wilhelm stuff throughout, but cast in an infinitely improved type:--what a blessing we did not cut off that young Head, at the Kaiser's dictation, in former years!--
At Konigsberg, as we learn in a dim indirect manner, the Crown- Prince sees King Stanislaus twice or thrice,--not formally, lest there be political offence taken, but incidentally at the houses of third-parties;--and is much pleased with the old gentleman; who is of cultivated good-natured ways, and has surely many curious things, from Charles XII. downwards, to tell a young man. [Came 8th October, went 21st (
Friedrich returned to Dantzig: saw that famous City, and late scene of War; tracing with lively interest the footsteps of Munnich and his Siege operations,--some of which are much blamed by judges, and by this young Soldier among the rest. There is a pretty Letter of his from Dantzig, turning mainly on those points. Letter written to his young Brother-in-law, Karl of Brunswick, who is now become Duke there; Grandfather and Father both dead; [Grandfather, 1st March, 1735; Father (who lost the
"DANTZIG, 26th OCTOBER, 1735. ... Thank my dear Sister for her services. I am charmed that she has made you papa with so good a grace. I fear you won't stop there; but will go on peopling the world"--one knows not to what extent--"with your amiable race. Would have written sooner; but I am just returning from the depths of the barbarous Countries; and having been charged with innumerable commissions which I did not understand too well, had no good possibility to think or to write.
"I have viewed all the Russian labors in these parts; have had the assault on the Hagelsberg narrated to me; been on the grounds;-- and own I had a better opinion of Marshal Munnich than to think him capable of so distracted an enterprise. [
The Brunswick Masterpiece, achieved on this occasion, grew to be a man and Duke, famous enough in the Newspapers in time coming: Champagne, 1792; Jena, 1806; George IV.'s Queen Caroline; these and other distracted phenomena (pretty much blotting out the earlier better sort) still keep him hanging painfully in men's memory. From his birth, now in this Prussian Journey of our Crown- Prince, to his death-stroke on the Field of Jena, what a seventy- one years!--
Fleury and the Kaiser, though it is long before the signature and last finish can take place, are come to terms of settlement, at the Crown-Prince's return; and it is known, in political circles, what the Kaiser's Polish-Election damages will probably amount to. Here are, in substance, the only conditions that could be got for him:--
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