The meeting in Cleve Country was, no doubt, a very pretty passage, with Two pretty Months following;--and if it be true that HELVETIUS was a consequence, the 11th of June, 1763, may almost claim to be a kind of epoch in Friedrich's later history. The opulent and ingenious M. Helvetius, who wrote DE L'ESPRIT, and has got banished for that feat (lost in the gloom of London in those months), had been a mighty Tax-gatherer as well; D'Alembert, as brother Philosophe, was familiar with Helvetius. It is certain, also, King Friedrich, at this time, found he would require annually two million thalers more;--where to get them, seemed the impossibility. A General Krockow, who had long been in French Service, and is much about the King, was often recommending the French Excise system;--he is the Krockow of DOMSTADTL, and that SIEGE OF OLMUTZ, memorable to some of us:--"A wonderful Excise system," Krockow is often saying, in this time of straits. "Who completely understands it?" the King might ask. "Helvetius, against the world!" D'Alembert could justly answer. "Invite Helvetius to leave his London exile, and accept an asylum here, where he may be of vital use to me!" concludes Friedrich. Helvetius came in March, 1765; stayed till June, 1766: [Rodenbeck, ii. 254; Preuss, iii. 11.]--within which time a French Excise system, which he had been devising and putting together, had just got in gear, and been in action for a month, to Helvetius's satisfaction. Who thereupon went his way, and never returned;--taking with him, as man and tax-gatherer, the King's lasting gratitude; but by no means that of the Prussian Nation, in his tax-gathering capacity! All Prussia, or all of it that fell under this Helvetius Excise system, united to condemn it, in all manner of dialects, louder and louder: here, for instance, is the utterance of Herr Hamann, himself a kind of Custom-house Clerk (at Konigsberg, in East Preussen), and on modest terms a Literary man of real merit and originality, who may be supposed to understand this subject: "And so," says Hamann, "the State has declared its own subjects incapable of managing its Finance system; and in this way has intrusted its heart, that is the purse of its subjects, to a company of Foreign Scoundrels, ignorant of everything relating to it!" ["Hamann to Jacobi" (see Preuss, iii. 1-35), "Konigsberg, 18th January, 1786."]