FREDERICK WILLIAM II. (1744-1797), king of Prussia, son of Augustus William, second son of King Frederick William I. and of Louise Amalie of Brunswick, sister of the wife of Frederick the Great, was born at Berlin on the 25th of September 1744, and became heir to the throne on his father's death in 1757. The boy was of an easy-going and pleasure-loving disposition, averse from sustained effort of any kind, and sensual by nature. His marriage with Elisabeth Christine, daughter of Duke Charles of Brunswick, contracted in 1765, was dissolved in 1769, and he soon afterwards married Frederika Louisa, daughter of the landgrave Louis IX. of Hesse-Darmstadt. Although he had a numerous family by his wife, he was completely under the influence of his mistress, Wilhelmine Enke, afterwards created Countess Lichtenau, a woman of strong intellect and much ambition. He was a man of singularly handsome presence, not without mental qualities of a high order; he was devoted to the arts--Beethoven and Mozart enjoyed his patronage and his private orchestra had a European reputation. But an artistic temperament was hardly that required of a king of Prussia on the eve of the Revolution; and Frederick the Great, who had employed him in various services--notably in an abortive confidential mission to the court of Russia in 1780--openly expressed his misgivings as to the character of the prince and his surroundings. The misgivings were justified by the event. Frederick William's accession to the throne (August 17, 1786) was, indeed, followed by a series of measures for lightening the burdens of the people, reforming the oppressive French system of tax-collecting introduced by Frederick, and encouraging trade by the diminution of customs dues and the making of roads and canals. This gave the new king much popularity with the mass of the people; while the educated classes were pleased by his removal of Frederick's ban on the German language by the admission of German writers to the Prussian Academy, and by the active encouragement given to schools and universities. But these reforms were vitiated in their source. In 1781 Frederick William, then prince of Prussia, inclined, like many sensual natures, to mysticism, had joined the Rosicrucians, and had fallen under the influence of Johann Christof Woellner (1732-1800), and by him the royal policy was inspired. Woellner, whom Frederick the Great had described as a "treacherous and intriguing priest," had started life as a poor tutor in the family of General von Itzenplitz, a noble of the mark of Brandenburg, had, after the general's death and to the scandal of king and nobility, married the general's daughter, and with his mother-in-law's assistance settled down on a small estate. By his practical experiments and by his writings he gained a considerable reputation as an economist; but his ambition was not content with this, and he sought to extend his influence by joining