HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH II. OF PRUSSIA
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cunning of diplomacy, management and sophistry, to save any mortal
who does not stand on the truth of things, from sinking, in the
long-run. Sinking to the very mud-gods, with all his diplomacies,
possessions, achievements; and becoming an unnamable object,
hidden deep in the Cesspools of the Universe. This I hope to make
manifest; this which I long ago discerned for myself, with
pleasure, in the physiognomy of Friedrich and his life.
Which indeed was the first real sanction, and has all along been
my inducement and encouragement, to study his life and him.
How this man, officially a King withal, comported himself in the
Eighteenth Century, and managed not to be a Liar and Charlatan as
his Century was, deserves to be seen a little by men and kings,
and may silently have didactic meanings in it.

He that was honest with his existence has always meaning for us,
be he king or peasant. He that merely shammed and grimaced with
it, however much, and with whatever noise and trumpet-blowing,
he may have cooked and eaten in this world, cannot long have any.
Some men do COOK enormously (let us call it COOKING, what a man
does in obedience to his HUNGER merely, to his desires and
passions merely),--roasting whole continents and populations,
in the flames of war or other discord;--witness the Napoleon above
spoken of. For the appetite of man in that respect is unlimited;
in truth, infinite; and the smallest of us could eat the entire
Solar System, had we the chance given, and then cry, like
Alexander of Macedon, because we had no more Solar Systems to cook
and eat. It is not the extent of the man's cookery that can much
attach me to him; but only the man himself, and what of strength
he had to wrestle with the mud-elements, and what of victory he
got for his own benefit and mine.


4. ENCOURAGEMENTS, DISCOURAGEMENTS.

French Revolution having spent itself, or sunk in France and
elsewhere to what we see, a certain curiosity reawakens as to what
of great or manful we can discover on the other side of that still
troubled atmosphere of the Present and immediate Past. Curiosity
quickened, or which should be quickened, by the great and all-