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THE ANCESTOR 23 had a friend ; he courted other sovereigns for the advantages which their alliance and goodwill might obtain for him ; he praised and censured his ministers just according as they turned out satisfactory or unsatisfactory instruments of his will ; but he ever dwarfed and stunted their best efforts by the weight of his own colossal intellect. ? - Hostile critics of Frederic II. may be inclined to rejoice at these tales of eccentricity and violence, of duplicity and cunning, so unfavourable to the reputation of Prussia's greatest king, with which the letters and despatches of the first Lord Malmesbury are filled at the time of his Berlin ministry, as well as in his subsequent mission to the Court of the Empress Catharine ; but the reader is asked kindly to re- member that the few short references which have been in these pages to his Prussian Majesty are only intended to be side- lights — casual glances — at the more peculiar traits of his ver- satile genius. For instance, the Harris Papers on the occasion of a Court banquet tell us that the king entered into a very minute detail of the expenses of a table on such an occasion, . . . enumerating the quantity and size of the wax candles, and leaving unnoticed no one single article likely to be wanted at such entertainments : ' So great is his Prussian Majesty, both in small and great affairs.' And again James Harris, writing to Lord Suffolk, then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, in March, 1775, informs his lordship of great ill- humour on the part of the Prussian monarch, to which the following episode from a despatch of that date adds a some- what ludicrous side : ^ — . . . He broke his flute a few days ago on the head of his favourite hussar, and is very liberal in kicking and cuffing those employed about his person. He is peevish at his meals, says little in his evening conversation, and is affable to nobody. Frederic the Great however must be excused by reason of the fact that he lived in an age when self-control, especially among persons of such exalted and royal rank as he, was a quality rather despised than otherwise, and when the head of a family, whether that family be royal or not, frequently con- sidered himself to have grossly neglected one of his first duties if he showed too much consideration towards its lesser members. Frederic's love for solitude is well known, as the following ^ Malmesbury Diaries and Correspondence (ante).