Hardly had he come to the throne when he attacked Maria Theresa, and marched his army into Silesia without warning. The iron ramrod of the Prussians proved successful, giving Frederick’s troops a far greater rapidity of fire than was possible to the wooden ramrod of the Austrians. But I am not now concerned with Frederick’s glories, and if you are interested in them you will get a far more vivid account of them from Lord Macaulay than I would care to write, even if I could; a later writer has referred scoffingly to “Macaulay’s lurid style.” All that I set out to prove was that this great man did not die of syphilis, as wicked slanders have said of him. Maria Theresa humbled, and Prussia for the first time on the map as a war-state, Frederick returned home to a well-deserved rest, and built himself the palace of Sans Souci, where he settled down to form a great centre of literature and arts on the lines of the French Academy. He was hardly a German in many ways; his favourite language was French, and his great ambition was to be a poet. Although he could speak three languages he could spell none; and a writer in the _Quarterly_ for 1847 gives some instances of his peculiarities in that respect. When writing a letter he used to add, in his own handwriting, some words often of bitter jibe or of sardonic humour; and these words were generally wrongly spelt. Thus, he used to spell “winter” hiverd, “actress” actrisse, “old” vieu, and “pay” peyer. That he never learned to spell “pay” properly was doubtless because he hated to think of such a thing; throughout his life, economy was his ruling passion.