“When you sent me, inclosed in your letter, those verses for our Marcus Aurelius of the North, I fully intended to pay my court to him with them. He was at that time to have come to Brussels _incognito_. But the quartan fever, which unhappily he still has, deranged all his projects. He has sent me a courier to Brussels, and so I set out to find him in the neighborhood of Cleves. “It was there that I saw one of the most amiable men in the world, who forms the charm of society, who would be every where sought after if he were not a king; a philosopher without austerity, full of sweetness, complaisance, and obliging ways--not remembering that he is king when he meets his friends; indeed, so completely forgetting it that he made me too almost forget it, and I needed an effort of memory to recollect that I here saw, sitting at the foot of my bed, a sovereign who had an army of a hundred thousand men.” CHAPTER XI. DIPLOMATIC INTRIGUES. The Herstal Affair.--The Summons.--Voltaire’s Manifesto.--George II. visits Hanover.--The Visit of Wilhelmina to Berlin.--Unpopularity of the King.--Death of the Emperor Charles VI. On the River Maas, a few miles north of the present city of Liege, there was a celebrated castle called Herstal. For many generations feudal lords had there displayed their pomp and power; and it had been the theatre not only of princely revelry, but of many scenes of violence and blood. A surrounding territory of a few thousand acres, cultivated by serfs, who were virtually slaves, was the hereditary domain of the petty lords of the castle. A few miles south of the castle there was a monastery called Liege, which was a dependency of the lords of Herstal. Amid the vicissitudes of the revolving centuries the rollicking lords grew poor, and the frugal monks grew rich. A thrifty city rose around the monastery, and its bishop wielded a power, temporal and spiritual, more potent than had ever issued from the walls of the now crumbling and dilapidated castle. In some of the perplexing diplomatic arrangements of those days, the castle of Herstal, with its surrounding district, was transferred to Frederick William of Prussia. The peasants, who had heard of the military rigor of Prussia, where almost every able-bodied man was crowded into the army, were exceedingly troubled by this transfer, and refused to take the oath of allegiance to their new sovereign, who had thus succeeded to the ownership of themselves, their flocks, and their herds. The gleaming sabres of Frederick William’s dragoons soon, however, brought them to terms. Thus compelled to submission, they remained unreconciled and irritated. Upon the withdrawal of the Prussian troops, the authority of Frederick William over the Herstal people also disappeared, for they greatly preferred the milder rule of the Bishop of Liege.