His influence upon young men appears to have been peculiarly pernicious. If we may believe Chesterfield, he was accustomed to ask them in a tone of irony upon their entrance into Parliament whether they too were going to be saints or Romans, and he employed all the weight of his position to make them regard purity and patriotism as ridiculous or unmanly. Of the next generation of statesmen, Fox, the first Lord Holland,[28] was the only man of remarkable ability who can be said to have been his disciple, and he was, perhaps, the most corrupt and unscrupulous of the statesmen of his age. [Illustration: FREDERICK THE GREAT.] FREDERICK THE GREAT. BY THOMAS CARLYLE. [Otherwise Frederick II, third king of Prussia, son of Frederick William I, and grandson of George I of England, born 1712, died 1786. Regarded in his youth, before his accession to the throne, as a spendthrift and voluptuary or as a prince of weak and vacillating character, his accession to the throne in 1740 instantly brought out his true character as the most able and masterful of rulers. His protracted wars with odds against him, often of four to one, in which he fought the banded armies of Europe, stamped him as a soldier of splendid genius and iron tenacity of endurance and purpose. During the Seven Years’ War he stood with only five million subjects against a hundred million. On the declaration of peace he devoted himself, with the same energy, to the restoration of the commerce, agriculture, and industries of Prussia as that with which he had fought her enemies, and with as much success. Frederick was not only a great soldier and civil administrator, though on somewhat despotic lines, but keenly sympathetic with literature, art, and science. All these he encouraged and fostered by every means. He was the true founder of the Prussian monarchy.]