Those have judged him most unjustly who have ascribed to him a cold heart. It is not the cold royal hearts which generally wound by their harshness. Such as these are almost always enabled, by a smooth graciousness and its suitable expression, to please their entourage. The strongest expressions of antipathy are generally combined with the heart-winning tones of a sentimental tenderness. But in Frederic, it appears to us, there was a striking and strange combination of two quite opposite tendencies of the spirit, which are usually found on earth in eternal irreconcilable contention. He had equally the need of idealising life, and the impulse mercilessly to destroy ideal frames of mind in himself and others. His first characteristic was perhaps the most beautiful, perhaps the most sorrowful, that ever man was endowed with for the struggle of life. He was undoubtedly a poetic nature; he possessed in a high degree that peculiar power which strives to transform common realities according to the ideal demands of its own nature, and to draw over everything about it the pure lustre of a new life. It was necessary to him to decorate with the graces of his fancy and the whole magic of emotional feeling the image of those he loved, and to adorn his relations with them. There was always something playful about it, and even where he felt most passionately he loved more the embellished picture of others, which he carried within him, than themselves. It was with such a disposition that he kissed Voltaire's hand. If at any time he sensibly felt the difference betwixt his ideal and the real man, he dropped the real and cherished the image. Whoever has received from nature this faculty of investing love and friendship with the coloured mirror of poetical dispositions, is sure, according to the judgment of others, to show arbitrariness in the choice of their objects of preference: a certain equable warmth which bethinks itself of everything suitable appears to be denied to such natures. To whoever the King became a friend, in his way, to him he always showed the greatest consideration and fidelity, however much at particular moments his disposition towards him might change. He could, therefore, be sentimental in his sorrow over the loss of such a cherished image as was only possible for a German of the Werther period. He had lived for many years in some estrangement from his sister von Baireuth; it was only in the last year before her death, amidst the terrors of war, that her image as that of a tender sister again revived in him. After her death he felt a gloomy satisfaction in recalling to himself and others, the heartfelt tenderness of this connection; he built her a small temple, and often made pilgrimages to it. Whoever failed to reach his heart by means of poetical feelings, or did not stir up in him the love-web of poetry, or who disturbed anything in his sensitive nature, to him he was cold, contemptuous, and