The home circle of this delicate prince was surely the strangest in the world. The royal family of Prussia in the reign of Frederick William I. was hardly a family and hardly royal. The monarch seemed to regard his sceptre chiefly as a superior kind of cudgel. As Prussian King, and therefore _ex officio_ the father of his people, he could treat them as children, could order them to be anything or to build anything or to pay anything, with even less risk of resistance than an Elector of Brandenburg might have had to fear. He was, it is true, on a footing of equality with foreign kings in negotiating for a treaty or a province or a bride. But apart from his acceptance of the perquisites of royalty, his life was one long protest against all that the world associated with the name of king. Intolerant of state and ceremony, he agonised his chamberlains by his behaviour. His recreations were such as befitted a bargeman on the Havel or an overgrown loafer kidnapped to serve in the King of Prussia’s giant grenadiers. In that snuff-taking age, a king whose hobby was to smoke pipes in a kind of glorified tavern-circle known as the Tobacco Parliament earned the reputation that would fall in our own day to a king who should chew and spit. Frederick William drank himself to death before he was fifty-two. Though an artist, if not a scholar, he drove Wolf, the philosopher, from his dominions and made Gundling President of the Academy of Letters because he amused the Tobacco Parliament when in his cups. As a sportsman he slew wild swine by the thousand and forced his subjects to buy their carcasses at a fixed price. He ordered his officials to spend only six thousand thalers on the entertainment of Peter the Great, but to give out that it cost him thirty or forty thousand. His mixture of fervent piety and immorality suggests that he was hardly sane, and his foreign policy does not discountenance the suggestion. In some of his officials he placed complete confidence, even when proofs that they were bribing his envoys abroad to send home false news were in his hands. He rushed upon others with his cudgel, first breaking their heads and then cashiering them. What he was to his children may be inferred from the fact that his daughter became his bitter satirist and his son his bitter foe. Such was the father who directed Frederick’s education. His talent for detail was always at the service of the state. It could be devoted to no worthier object than the training of the future king. At the age of nine years, therefore, Frederick found every hour of the day assigned to some part of the scheme of education by which the crowned Podsnap designed to make him such another as himself.