To the biographer of Frederick, 1757 is welcome, for Frederick now begins to be a hero. Had a chance bullet at Lobositz struck him down, the world would have known only a king who promised to bring in a new era of government, but who owed to his father’s work and methods the chief part of whatever success he achieved. For creative power he would have taken rank below the Great Elector and Frederick William, for military renown below the Old Dessauer and Schwerin; for the aggrandisement of his House, who knows? for who can calculate what havoc the Coalition of 1757 would have wrought with his dominions? The Frederick who had bequeathed to Prussia several volumes of prose and verse in French and the memory of sixteen years’ tenure of Silesia would hardly be known to fame as Frederick the Great. In 1757, however, he takes his stand for the existence of Prussia. At the moment that the military balance turns against him the moral balance turns in his favour. Courage, energy, resource, determination, all displayed through a score of lifetimes, if sensations rather than moments make up life,—Frederick is the embodiment of these things during the next six years. At first it is his daring that seems to eclipse all else. If Frederick feared not God, neither did he regard man. Far from being dazzled by the array of sceptres marshalled against him, he determined to strike before his foes could form. With the first breath of spring he despatched three royal princes and the Duke of Bevern against four several points in Bohemia. “If those false attacks have so far succeeded as to cover the King of Prussia’s real intention,” writes Mitchell on April 18th, “I may venture to say that His Prussian Majesty is upon the point of executing one of the boldest and one of the greatest designs that ever was attempted by man.” Just at this juncture a plot against his life was discovered. “I think upon the whole His Prussian Majesty has had a very narrow escape, which however seems to have made no impression at all upon him, nor to have created in him the least diffidence whatever of anybody.” Such is his Scotch friend’s account of the King at the outset of the chequered campaign to which he owes the immensity of his fame.