It is still less certain that his character had gained from the second education. Many of the striking traits of old reappear. Frederick is still before all else brilliant—a gay and versatile young man with elastic spirits and a passion for music, society, and intellectual conversation. Despite his father’s hatred of all things French, Frederick still looked on Paris as the Mecca of civilisation. His literary ambitions were more pronounced than ever. At Cüstrin he had gone back to verses—verses always Gallic, copious, and bad. A Prussian patriot lamented that while he knew not whether his ancestors had won Magdeburg at cards or in some other way, he had Aristotle’s rules of composition by heart. Yet, for all his perseverance, Lord Mahon speaks with justice of “his two kinds of prose, the rhymed and unrhymed.” In the darkest hours of his struggle against all Europe, he sat down to rhyme in French. “He does not really know the Germans at all,” complained his tutors. Though sometimes brutal, he prided himself on his ceremonious politeness—a German version of Louis XIV. All through his career he was wont at times to put on the great monarch. “Hush, gentlemen,” once exclaimed Voltaire when his royal host thus suddenly stiffened, “the King of Prussia has just come in.” His morals were no better after confronting death than before. “The flesh is weak,” he writes to his mother, “but I do not believe that Cato was Cato when he was young.” It was said that the motive of his amours was vainglory rather than the satisfaction of vicious desires. No one, wrote harsh critics, could rely upon his word, and few if any could tell of a disinterested act that he had done. Yet in some respects Frederick had gained. His talent for diplomacy grew with the need for it. His father’s schooling had this effect—that he learned to outwit his father. The closing years of Frederick William’s life were cheered by the mirage of a good son and a good husband, which of all Frederick’s fabrications was perhaps the cleverest. Progress in diplomacy was attended by increase of self-control. Frederick learned in a hard school to disguise his true emotions and to feign what he did not feel. Hence arises a difficulty which Carlyle constantly encounters as he strives to approach his hero with paternal sympathy and to penetrate into his inner man. He is forced to speak of Frederick’s “polished panoply,” and to describe him as “outwardly a radiant but metallic object to mankind.”