FREDERIC THE GREAT. There is a surprising parallelism between the fathers of these two greatest men of the eighteenth century. These fathers, whom narrow-minded critics usually call pedants, transmitted to their sons the great gift of “life’s serious conduct.” Rarely has the old Councillor Goethe found so much just appreciation as Carlyle has shown for Frederic William I. The character of both the sons constitutes a happy combination of this serious paternal heritage and the joyful element of sanguine optimism. Both, although they owe perhaps most to their fathers, feel themselves drawn to the softer natures of their mothers, who hardly ever refused them any wish. And most of us prefer to share with them the love of their charming mothers, Frau Rath and Sophie Dorothea,--because it is always more agreeable to be loved than to be educated,--and reserve for the fathers at best a cool esteem. Travel for pleasure or sport was unknown to the old Spartan King of Prussia, as indeed it was to his greater son, who did not even appreciate the sport of hunting. When they traveled it was for the inspection of the administration of their country or to review their troops. Old Frederic William, in his great simplicity, preferred even to pass the night in airy barns than to sleep in stuffy rooms. “Dinner-table to be spread always in some airy place, garden-house, tent, big clean barn,--Majesty likes air, of all things;--will sleep too, in a clean barn or garden-house: better anything than being stifled, thinks his Majesty.” We never hear that he stopped at inns, and Frederic, too, we meet only rarely in taverns, once in Braunschweig in Korn’s Hotel, where he was received one night in the Freemasons’ lodge very secretly because his severe papa despised such childish fooleries utterly. Occasionally, perhaps, while in Potsdam he visits inns like “The Three Crowns,” where one could find better food, he says, than at the table of his Mecklenburg cousins in their castle Mirow. In the first year of his reign, when he traveled _incognito_ to French Alsace, he had very distressing experiences in different taverns. In a letter to Voltaire he describes in French verses the various accidents of this trip:-- “Avec de coursiers efflanqués En ligne droite issus de Rosinante, Et des paysans en postillons masqués, Butors de race impertinente, Notre carosse en cent lieux accroché, Nous allions gravement, d’une allure indolente, Gravitant contre les rochers.” Traveling all day in the worst of weathers, as if the last day of judgment had come, and in the evening to get a poor meal in a miserable tavern--and a large bill:-- “Car des hôtes intéressés De la faim nous voyant pressés, D’une façon plus que frugale Dans une chaumière infernale En nous empoisonnant, nous volaient nos écus. O siècle différent des temps de Lucullus!”