YEARS have passed since we met Thomas Carlyle in these pages. We then discussed the two first volumes of the history of Frederick; the goodly bulk of four others that have appeared in the interval tells us that he must have diligently devoted the whole period to his hero. Many summers and winters have still found the philosopher seated in his study, where the singular goblins whom, by some strange spell, learnt from we know not what wizard, he evoked in early life, the Mud-Demons, Windbags, Phantasm Captains, Dryasdusts, &c., &c., have clung to him with astonishing pertinacity. Dwelling incessantly in an atmosphere of unreality, in that strange region to which he was long ago introduced by German metaphysicians, much bemuddled in tobacco and beer, and with which English readers have got to be as familiar as young Cockneys with a Drury Lane pantomime, it might have been expected that he would in some degree lose his hold on humanity, and would adapt himself more and more to those cloudlands wherein he delighted to abide. Long persistence in the theory of regarding this material earth and those who walk on it as mere shadows, might have ended in dissolving for any practical purpose his relations with actual life, and causing all his acts, and his judgments on the acts of others, to be referred more and more to that mysterious standard of measurement, the nature of which has been so copiously, yet so dimly, revealed to us. Dimly, we say; for after all our experience of the sage's opinions on men and things, we are still at a loss to imagine in what light he would be pleased to regard any single character or event in history on which he has not yet delivered a verdict. Whether King Herod, Nero, Philip II., and the Duke of Alva, were Mud-demons,

or

"inarticulate men of genius;" whether the judicial career of Judge Jefferies is to be pronounced "very Rhadamanthine," or an episode of devil-worship; whether the fall of the Roman empire, or the Peninsular war, or the Indian mutiny, were in consonance with the "Laws of the Universe," or in opposition to that mystic code, no disciple can tell us, for it is the character of his philosophy that it always requires to be interpreted and applied by the author. Under these circumstances, a practical man, puzzled in the labyrinthine wildernesses of the world, and seeking light and guidance, might prefer some homely candle which he could carry in his hand, to the fitful irradiations of that more elaborate apparatus which, like Mr Pickwick's dark lantern, produces effects chiefly meteoric and bewildering.

Far, however, from becoming more and more hazy and unintelligible as he grows older, he exhibits in these later volumes fewer crotchets and fewer freaks of style, but not less of that descriptive and allusive power and wealth of imagery which have always formed his chief attractions. The "gilt farthings" which we spoke of in a former review of his book, the bits of commonplace palmed upon us under a thick disguise of staring metaphor and allusion, have been mostly withdrawn from circulation, and replaced by a more legitimate coinage.

No doubt this view of the later volumes is partly due to our familiarity with Carlylese, rendering us indifferent to verbal pranks, and more sensitive to excellences. But it is owing in much greater degree to the improvement in his subject. He is no longer encumbered with Frederick - William, the eccentric hero of the earlier volumes, the crazy, brutal father of the soldierking. The insupportable tediousness of such dim transactions as

"Double-Marriage Projects" and "Tobacco Parliaments" (or orgies in which the crack-brained potentate indulged, along with a few congenial lunatics and idiots), happily came to an end along with their author. Frederick's boyhood, too, so squalid, so barren of interest and incident, giving so little promise or suggestion of the future conqueror and statesman, had ended before his father's death; and with the wars for which he gave the signal by the seizure of Silesia, he stands forth surrounded by figures so spirited and so martial, in the midst of such a clangour of arms and shock of nations, as would lend interest to a narrative far less picturesque in treatment and clear in effect than Mr Carlyle's. For, the same industry which formerly led the historian to grope and sift thoroughly, though with many lamentations and protests, amid the chronicles of the voluminous Dryasdusts of Prussia, and pick such scraps as suited him from the chaos of stupidity, has also induced him, as the chronicler of a conspicuous era in war, to study military problems to unusually good purpose. A man who can in a science so eminently practical, and which has for the most part been so pedantically treated, as the science of war, discard the pedantry, arrive at common-sense conclusions, and describe military operations with unusual spirit and lucidity, must possess faculties of whose existence there was little evidence in his former works. Exuberance of imagery, fertility of allusion, occasional passages of vigorous eloquence in painting a scene or a characterthese we should expect from the author of 'Sartor Resartus' and 'Hero-worship,' but not a plain account of the manoeuvres of hostile armies.

We do not yet understand why a writer of Mr Carlyle's peculiar fashion and modes of thought should have selected the history of Frederick for a theme. It is true that he is a successful representative of

that government of force which the philosopher has always held up as the perfection of a political system

But

successful, because of a small kingdom he made a great power; because, with inadequate means, he did the work and achieved the results due to great means; because he made for his army, his country, and himself, a fine and lasting reputation. The power inherited from his father suffered no diminution of absolutism in Frederick's hands; and we should not have been surprised had he been selected for glorification in an additional chapter on Hero-worship.' here the work of years is devoted to the career of a man whose great merit was, that he was a successful fighter of battles. A character less elevated, less fertile of opportunities for indulging a romantic or poetic vein in the biographer, is scarcely to be found in the high places of history. The fact that the king, among his aspirations, aimed at being a poet, tells altogether against him; for his aim was mere versification and Sternholdian grandiloquence, and in that he failed. Mr Carlyle, with all his tendencies setting towards the romantic and picturesque sides of human character-large dealings, far-reaching influence, and high, if "inarticulate," genius, is tied for years to a subject which, except in the military phase, is commonplace

crafty, unusually deficient in great qualities or great motives, and which no amount of gloss or drapery can present as heroic. "Frederick's ideal," says his biographer, "compared to that of some, was low; his existence, a hard and barren, though a genuine one, and only worth much memory in the absence of better." Why not have sought better, then, Mr Carlyle ?

Frederick was twenty-eight years old when he began to reign. He had grown up amid influences the most unfortunate and unfavourable. The character of the personage who ruled in the home of his youth is well known. None of the

ruffians who are charged before police magistrates with brutal outrages on the members of their wretched households could exceed in reckless and capricious cruelty this truculent monarch. It was to be expected that Frederick, his intellect and sympathies alike cramped by this iron rule of savagery, would seize not the best but the readiest consolations that might offer, and that the character of his mind would deteriorate. Except in fairy tales and didactic novels, it is rare to find squalor, hardship, and oppression favourable to the development of virtue and of nobility of character. The duplicity which habitual terror had produced in the boy reappeared in the king, but in the more respectable form of reticent state-craft. The external casing of indifference, necessary for any one who would live at all under such conditions, had become in the man a bright hard shell, impervious alike to the touch of sympathy or the blow of fate. The highest heaven he could look forward to in youth was deliverance from domestic tyranny-that attained, he saw nothing beyond either to fear or to hope for. Irreverent, practical, shrewd, brave, selfreliant, severe but not cruel, of quick decision, exacting much and rewarding sparingly or grudgingly-such was the king and leader who now stepped on the world's stage.

The stage was, at this juncture, well suited to the hero. Wars were no longer waged on large grounds, national or religious. A succession of absolute sovereigns since the feudal period had at length culminated in an order of beings who looked on the territories they ruled as their private property, to be sold, transferred, exchanged, or bequeathed, as the family interests of the proprietor might dictate. As might have been expected under such circumstances, there were, for whole districts in Europe, numerous claimants, whether on the score of relationship to a former proprietor, purchase, convenience, or political exigency. It was not difficult, there

fore, for an ambitious sovereign to find both a colourable pretext for war, and powerful allies in those who, having similar claims_elsewhere, bargained for reciprocal support. And if the times were favourable to the picking of a quarrel, they were no less so to its prosecution, by a sovereign of exceptional ability. For at this time there were in Europe no great leaders, either in politics or war. Dull or frivolous sovereigns occupied the thrones, and suffered favourites or mere routine statesmen to dictate their policy. The great generals of a preceding generation, Marlborough, Eugene, Villars, had left representatives only of their system of war, not of their genius. Pedantry-that is to say, an extreme addiction to forms, without reference to their meaning or their applicability-was the characteristic in the training of armies and the conduct of generals, and ruled as absolutely in the field as other forms of incapacity in council. Contests, begun for petty and private objects, grew in their progress aimless and unmeaning, and chicanery had become, in an unusual degree, an element of diplomacy.

On such a scene, amid such competitors, Frederick was peculiarly fitted to succeed. A man of high and noble character-a Bayard or a Turenne-would have entered the field with obsolete armour and weapons. But Frederick was as eminent for astuteness as for ability; and amid the shifting politics of the time, he had the advantage of a clear and definite object. His design was to seize, at the first favourable opportunity, the Austrian province of Silesia; and either to retain it, or make of the possession of it a lever by which to wrest from Austria a recognition to his title to certain territories on the Rhine; and the necessary, or at any rate judicious, preliminary to such seizure must be the establishment of a fair-seeming pretext.

Silesia had never been Prussian. But more than two hundred years before Frederick's time, his ances

tor, the Elector of Brandenburg, had made a compact with the Duke of Liegnitz, lord of considerable territories in Silesia, by which either prince, on failure of heirs to the other, was to succeed to their joint dominions. As the Duke was a vassal of the King of Bohemia, the monarch's sanction had been necessary to render the arrangement valid. But this king's successor, fearing perhaps to see a too powerful neighbour established on his borders, had recalled the sanction, and the deed had been cancelled by state authority; the vassal had been compelled to give up his parchments, but the Elector of Brandenburg had refused to part with his. In 1675, a hundred and forty years afterwards, the last Duke of Liegnitz died, and the Elector of Brandenburg, reviving the old question, urged his claim upon the Emperor Leopold. Let Mr Carlyle describe the colloquy.

"Kaiser Leopold in the scarlet stockings will not hear of Heritage-Fraternity. Nonsense!? answers Kaiser Leopold: 'a thing suppressed at once, ages ago; by Imperial Power: flat zero of a thing, at this time; and you, I again bid you, return me your papers upon it.'

This latter act of duty FriedrichWilhelm would not do; but continued insisting. Jagerndorf at least, O Kaiser of the world,' said he; 'Jagerndorf, there is no colour for your keeping that!' To which the Kaiser again answers, Nonsense!'-and even falls upon astonishing schemes about it, as we shall see; but gives nothing."

Such was the claim to the Duchies of Lower Silesia-founded upon a deed contracted two hundred years before, which never took effect, and which was formally annulled by the same authority as had sanctioned it. The claim to Jagerndorf, a duchy in Southern Silesia, rested on different grounds. The younger sons of the Electors of Brandenburg had occasionally been provided for by giving them the territories of Baireuth and Anspach. In this way members of a younger branch of the Hohenzollerns appear in history as princes; and one of these,

George, Margrave of Anspach, acquired, in exchange for other territories which he had purchased with his own money, the duchy of Jagerndorf. "Hereby," says Mr Carlyle," has Jagerndorf joined itself to the Brandenburg territories." Rather an audacious assertion, the reader will probably think, considering that the said Margrave George never ruled in Brandenburg.

The descendant of this Margrave dying without children in 1603, his duchy of Jagerndorf fell to the Elector of Brandenburg, who settled it on his second son, Johann George. This prince, joining the King of Bohemia in war against the Kaiser, was put under the ban of the empire, and his territory forfeited. On what the subsequent claim of Brandenburg to Jagerndorf was exactly founded, Mr Carlyle does not tell us; but the Electors may be presumed to have argued that the territory which they had divided from the Electorate ought to have been restored to it. But before the reader is in a position to estimate the justice of the claim, it is necessary that he should know what an advocate might have to say on the Austrian side of these questions; and as the Silesian wars are so important in the history of Frederick, the first volume of the work would have been better employed in giving us full means of forming a judgment than in the tedious and unnecessary account of Frederick's ancestors and their doings. On the evidence vouchsafed to us we should confidently say, that if such claims were to be in all cases supported by war, there could be no peace for any nation on the face of the earth.

From the promptitude with which Frederick acted when the opportunity came, it is evident that he had made up his mind about the seizure of Silesia as soon as he became king. Of the merits and validity of the pretexts for the act, the reader must judge from the summary we have just given. For him and for Prussia it was the most (indeed the only) momentous act of his

reign; for his whole history is the history of his struggle for the retention of this Austrian province. Of his motives the King says himself, after recapitulating certain considerations-"Add to these reasons an army ready for acting, funds, supplies all found, and perhaps the desire of making one's self a name; all this was cause of the war which the King now entered upon." Perhaps the reader will think with us that there is little evidence here except of "low ambition and the pride of kings." But Mr Carlyle is of another mind about his hero. "This young king," he says, "is magnanimous; not much to be called ambitious, or not in the vulgar sense almost at all-strange as it may sound to readers." And on what the King himself said about his motives he discourses as follows:

"Desire to make himself a name! how shocking!' exclaim several historians. 'Candour of confession that he

may have had some such desire; how honest!' is what they do not exclaim. As to the justice of his Silesian claims, or even to his own belief about their justice, Frederick affords not the least light which can be new to readers here. He speaks, when business requires it, of those known rights' of his, and with the air of a man who expects to be believed on his word; but it is cursorily, and in the business way only; and there is not here or elsewhere the least pleading: a man, you would say, considerably indifferent to our belief on that head; his eye set on the practical merely. Just Rights? what are rights, never so just, which you cannot make valid? The world is full of such. If you have rights and can assert them into facts, do it; that is worth doing!"" Was ever such pleading heard at the Old Bailey as this of our moral historian, our guide, philosopher, and friend Thomas? Is it not exactly the simple code of law of Rob Roy

"That he should take who has the power,

And he should keep who can"? and was Rob's code "in accordance with the laws of this universe," or was it "Devil-worship"?

All

Frederick, then, being provided with a pretext, such as it was, still wanted an opportunity. It came far more speedily than could have been anticipated. Within a year of the King's accession, the Emperor Leopold died very unexpectedly. By the law of the Austrian States females could not succeed, and he had daughters only. his life, therefore, he had been employed in impressing on the political world (that is to say, the various courts of Europe), the necessity of upholding a private arrangement of his called, like similar arbitrary and exceptional acts, "a pragmatic sanction," whereby he decreed that his female children should succeed him in the Austrian States; and to this instrument he had obtained the concurrence of several European powers. At his death his daughter, Maria-Theresa, became Archduchess of Austria and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia; and in the accession of this young woman, inexperienced in rule, holding her position by a questionable title, and having but a bankrupt exchequer, Frederick saw his opportunity.

ous.

Now we are not going to insist that magnanimity, or generosity, or any other large-hearted quality, ought to be the prime element in politics. On the contrary, seeing what are the mischievous results of sentimental statesmanship in our times, we rather insist that, of all motives of state policy, those which are romantic are the most perniciThe dullest of matter-of-fact men would be much safer as a political leader than Don Quixote; and whenever a politician, in press or parliament, is particularly loud in asserting high-minded doctrines of injuries, and so forth, he is tolerof national self-sacrifice, toleration ably certain to be either a knave or a fool. Frederick's own ideas on the ated. "My Lord," he says to the subject have been plainly enunciEnglish ambassador, "don't talk to me of magnanimity; a prince" (acting not for himself but for his nation, interpolates Mr Carlyle)