"The king of Prussia, before his father's death, had written a work against the principles of Machiavelli. If Machiavelli had had a prince for disciple, he would have recommended him, in the first place, to write against him; but the prince royal did not understand this sort of finesse. He had written in good faith at a time when he was not sovereign; and his father inspired him with no partiality for despotic power. He sincerely praised moderation and justice, and in his enthusiasm regarded every usurpation as a crime. He had sent me the manuscript to correct and publish. I now began to feel remorse at printing the "Anti-Machiavel," while the king of Prussia, with an hundred millions in his treasury, took one, by means of counsellor Rambonet, from the poor inhabitants of Liège. I suspected that my Solomon would not stop there. His father had left sixty-six thousand four hundred excellent soldiers. He augmented the number, and seemed eager to make use of them. I represented to him that it was not quite right to print his book at a time when he might be reproached for violating its precepts. He permitted me to stop the edition. I went to Holland entirely to do him this little service; but the bookseller asked so much money in compensation, that the king, who in his heart was not sorry to see himself in print, preferred being so for nothing, rather than to pay not to be." We have extracted this whole account as highly characteristic, and as explanatory of much that followed. Frederic loved and enjoyed talent, and was himself a man of genius; he was simple-minded as a German; unaccustomed to show and luxury; but he was a king and a soldier. He was young and ambitious. Voltaire laughed at his economy, ridiculed his plainness, saw through his pretensions to liberal opinions, and jested wittily on their friendship. Yet, withal, he was flattered by it. He saw a refuge and a support against the persecutions he feared in his own country; and though he would have preferred that a sovereign who called him friend had been more royal in outward show, he was forced to be satisfied that though badly dressed and meanly attended, yet he was really a king, with millions in his coffres, and thousands of soldiers at his command, and, above all, a man of genius. "He is the most delightful man in the world," he writes, "and would be sought by every one, even were he not a king: philosophical without austerity, full of gentleness, complaisance, and agreeable qualities; forgetting that he is a sovereign as soon as he is with his friends, and so forgetting, that it required an effort of memory to recollect that he was one." Such was the impression which the young king made on his older friend, who had been accustomed to courts and royalty. But still he felt that the friend of a king is not half as independent in the royal palace as in another kingdom. Probably madame du Châtelet's admirable understanding helped