7th Aug., 1741.

Robinson. "The common news now is" (rumor in Diplomatic circles, rather below the truth this time), " your Majesty, after the 12th of August, will join the French." (King looks fixedly at him in silence.) Sire, I venture to hope not! Austria prefers your friendship; but if your Majesty disdain Austria's advances, what is it to do? Austria must throw itself entirely into the hands of France, and endeavor to outbid your Majesty!" (King quite silent.)

"King was quite silent upon this head," says Robinson, reporting: silence, guesses Robinson, founded most probably upon "his consciousness of guilt”—what I, florid Yorkshire Gentleman, call guilt, as being against the Cause of Liberty and us! "From time to time he threw out remarks on the advantageousness of his situation."

King. **“At the head of such an Army, which the Enemy has already made experience of, and which is ready for the Enemy again, if he have appetite! With the Country which alone I am concerned with conquered and secured behind me; a Country that alone lies convenient to me; which is all I want, which I now have; which I will and must keep! Shall I be bought out of this country? Never! I will sooner perish in it with all my troops. With what face shall I meet my Ancestors if I abandon my right which they have transmitted to me? My first enterprise, and to be given up lightly ?" with more of the like sort, which Friedrich, in writing of it long after, seems rather ashamed of, and would fain consider to have been mock fustian, provoked by the real fustian of Sir Thomas Robinson," who negotiated in a wordy, highdroning way, as if he were speaking in Parliament," says Friedrich (a Friedrich not taken with that style of eloquence, and hoping he rather quizzed it than was serious with it,19 though Robinson and Hyndford found in him no want of vehement seriousness, but rather the reverse!) He concludes: "Have I need of Peace? Let those who need it give me what I want, or let them fight me again and be beaten again. Have not they given whole Kingdoms to Spain?" (Naples at one swoop to the Termagant, as broken glass, in that Polish-Election freak!) "And to me they can not spare a few trifling Principalities? If the Queen does not now grant me all I require, I shall in four weeks demand Four Principalities more!" (Nay, I now do it, being in Sibillyne tune.) "I now demand the whole of Lower Silesia, Breslau included; and with that Answer you can return to Vienna."

Robinson. "With that Answer! Is your Majesty serious?"

King. "With that." A most vehement young King; no negotiating with him, Sir Thomas! It is like negotiating for the Sibyl's Books: the longer you bargain, the higher he will rise. In four weeks' time he

19 Euvres de Frédéric, ii., 84.

1

7th Aug., 1741.

will demand Four Principalities more; nay, already demands them, the whole of Lower Silesia and Breslau. A precious negotiation I have made of it! Sir Thomas, wide-eyed, asks a second time:

Robinson. “Is that your Majesty's deliberate Answer?"

King. “Yes, I say. That is my Answer, and I will never give another."

Hyndford and Robinson (much flurried, to Podewils). “Your Excellency, please to comprehend, the Proposals from Vienna were—”

King. Messieurs, Messieurs, it is of no use even to think of it." 'And, taking off his hat," slightly raising his hat, as salutation and finale, “he retired precipitately behind the curtain of the interior corner of the tent," says the reporter. Exit King!

Robinson (totally flurried, to Podewils). “Your Excellency, France will abandon Prussia, will sacrifice Prussia to self-interest."

Podewils. "No, no! France will not deceive us; we have not deceived France." (Scene closes; curtain falls.) 20

man.

The unsuccessfullest negotiation well imaginable by a public Strehlen, Monday, 7th August, 1741: Friedrich has vanished into the interior of his tent, and the two Diplomatic gentlemen, the wind struck out of them in this manner, remain gazing at one another. Here truly is a young Royal gentleman that knows his own mind, while so many do not. Unspeakable imbroglio of negotiations, mostly insane, welters over all the Earth; the Belleisles, the Aulic Councils, the British Georges, heaping coil upon coil; and here, notably, in that now so extremely sordid murk of wiggeries, inane diplomacies, and solemn deliriums, dark now and obsolete to all creatures, steps forth one little Human Figure with something of sanity in it, like a star, like a gleam of steel, sheering asunder your big balloons, and letting out their diplomatic hydrogen; salutes with his hat, "Gentlemen, Gentlemen, it is of no use !" and vanishes into the interior of his tent. It is to Excellency Robinson, among all the sons of Adam then extant, that we owe this interesting Passage of History-authentic glimpse, face to face, of the young Friedrich in those extraordinary circumstances; every feature substantially as above, and recognizable for true. Many Dispatches

20 State-Paper Office (Robinson to Harrington, Breslau, 9th August, 1741); Raumer, p. 106-110. Compare Euvres de Frédéric, ii., 84; and Valori, i., 119, 122.

9th Aug., 1741.

his Excellency wrote in this world-sixty or eighty volumes of them still left-but among them is this One: the angriest of mankind can not say that his Excellency lived and embassied quite in vain!

The Two Britannic Gentlemen, both on that distressing Monday and the day following, had the honor to dine with the King, who seemed in exuberant spirits, cutting and bantering to right and left, upon the Court of Vienna among other topics, in a way which I Robinson "will not repeat to your Lordship." Bade me, for example, "As you pass through Neisse, make my compliments to Marshal Neipperg; and you can say, Excellency Robinson, that I hope to have the pleasure of calling one of these days!" Podewils, who was civil, pressed us much to stay over Wednesday the 9th. "On Thursday is to be a Grand Review, one of the finest military sights, to which the Excellencies from Breslau, one and all, are coming out." But we, having our Dispatches and Expresses on hand, pleaded business, and declined, in spite of Podewils's urgencies, and set off for Breslau Wednesday morning, meeting various Excellencies-by degrees, all the Excellencies, on the road for that Review we had heard of.

Readers must accept this Robinsoniad as the last of Friedrich's Diplomatic performances at Strehlen, which in effect it nearly was, and from these instances imagine his way in such things. Various Letters there are, to Jordan principally, some to Algarotti, both of whom he still keeps at Breslau, and sends for if there is like to be an hour of leisure. The Letters indicate cheerfulness of humor, even levity, in the Writer, which is worth noting in this wild clash of things now tumbling round him, and looking to him as its centre; but they otherwise, though heartily and frankly written, are, to Jordan and us, as if written from the teeth outward, and throw no light whatever either on things befalling, or on Friedrich's humor under them. Reading diligently, we do notice one thing, That the talk about "fame (gloire)" has died out. Not the least mention now of gloire; perception now, most probably, that there are other things than "gloire" to be had by taking arms, and that War is a terribly grave thing, lightly as one may go into it at first! This small

9th Aug., 1741. inference we do negatively draw from the Friedrich Correspondence of those months; and except this, and the levity of humor noticeable, we practically get no light whatever from it, the practical soul and soul's business of Friedrich being entirely kept veiled there, as usual.

And veiled, too, in such a way that you do not notice any veil, the young King being, as we often intimate, a master in this art, which useful circumstance has done him much ill with readers and mankind. For, if you intend to interest readers-that is to say, idle neighbors, and fellow-creatures in need of gossipthere is nothing like unveiling yourself: witness Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many other poor waste creatures, going off in selfconflagration, for amusement of the parish, in that manner. But may not a man have something other on hand with his Existence than that of "setting fire to it" (such the process terribly is), "to show the people a fine play of colors, and get himself applauded, and pathetically blubbered over ?" Alas! my friends!

It is certain there was seldom such a life-element as this of Friedrich's in Summer 1741. Here is the enormous jumbling of a World broken loose, boiling as in very chaos; asking of him, him more than any other, "How? What?" Enough to put gloire out of his head, and awaken thoughts-terrors, if you were of apprehensive turn! Surely no young man of twentynine more needed all the human qualities than Friedrich now. The threatenings, the seductions, big Belleisle hallucinations, the perils to you infinite if you miss the road. Friedrich did not miss it, as is well known; he managed to pick it out from that enormous jumble of the elements, and victoriously arrived by it, he alone of them all, which is evidence of silent or latent faculty in him, still more wonderful than the loud-resounding ones of which the world has heard. Probably there was not, in his history, any chapter more significant of human faculty than this, which is not on record at all.

10th Aug., 1741.

CHAPTER III.

GRAND REVIEW AT STREHLEN: NEIPPERG TAKES AIM AT BRESLAU, BUT ANOTHER HITS IT.

A DAY or two before that famous Audience of Hyndford and Robinson's, Neipperg had quitted his impregnable Camp at Neisse, and taken the field again, in the hope of perhaps helping Robinson's Negotiation by an inverse method. Should Robinson's offers not prove attractive enough, as is to be feared, a push from behind may have good effects. Neipperg intends to have a stroke on Breslau; to twitch Breslau out of Friedrich's hands by a private manoeuvre on new resources that have offered themselves.1

In Breslau, which is by great majority Protestant in creed and warmly Prussian in temper, there has been no oppression or unfair usage heard of to any class of persons, and certainly in the matter of Protestant and Catholic there has been perfect equality observed. True, the change from favor and ascendency to mere equality is not in itself welcome to human creatures ; one conceives, for various reasons of lower and higher nature, a minority of discontented individuals in Breslau, zealous for their creed and old perquisites sacred and profane, who long in secret, sometimes vocally to one another, for the good old times, when souls were not liable to perish wholesale, and people guilty only of loyalty and orthodoxy to be turned out of their offices on suspicion. Friedrich says it was mainly certain zealous Old Ladies of Quality who went into this adventure, and from whispering to one another, got into speaking, into meeting in one another's houses for the purpose of concerting and contriving.2 Zealous Old Ladies of Quality-these we consider were the Talking-Apparatus or Secret-Parliament of the thing; but it is certain one or two Official Gentlemen (Syndic Guzmar for instance, and others not yet become Ex-Official) had active hand in it, and furnished the practical ideas.

1 Helden-Geschichte, i., 982, and ii., 227.

2 ŒŒuvres, ii., 82, 83.