This novus homo among sovereigns was now a fellow king with the rulers of England, France, Denmark, and Sweden, and the only crowned head in the empire, except the Emperor himself, and the Elector of Saxony, who had been chosen King of Poland in 1697. By persistent sycophancy he had pushed his way into the inner circle of the crowned. Those who have picked social locks these latter days by similar sycophancies, by losses at bridge in the proper quarter, by suffering sly familiarities to their women folk, and by wearing their personal and family dignity in sole leather, may know something of the humiliating experiences of this new monarch. He was a feeble fellow, but his son and successor, Frederick William I, "a shrewd but brutal boor," so Lord Rosebery calls him, and there could not be a better judge, amazed Europe by his taste for collecting tall soldiers, by his parsimony, his kennel manners in the treatment of his family and his subjects, and leaves a name in history as the first, greatest, and the unique collector of human beings on a Barnumesque scale. All known collectors of birds, beetles, butterflies, and beasts accord him an easy supremacy, for his aggregation of colossal grenadiers. It is temptingly easy to be epigrammatic, perhaps witty, at the expense of Frederick William I of Prussia. The man, however, who freed the serfs; who readjusted the taxes; who insisted upon industry and honesty among his officials; who proclaimed liberty of conscience and of thought; who first put on, to wear for the rest of his life, the uniform of his army, and thus made every officer proud to wear the uniform himself; and who left his son an army of eighty thousand men, thoroughly equipped and trained, and an overflowing treasury, may not be dismissed merely with anecdotes of his eccentric brutality.