“By means of music, ideas, feelings, historical events, natural phenomena, pictures, and scenes of life of all sorts are as clearly and intelligibly expressed as by any language in words; and we are ourselves enabled to express ourselves in such a manner, and to make ourselves understood by others. It is, above all, in the gloomy hours of affliction that music is a soothing comforter, and whoever has experienced this effect himself will admit that for this fairest service rendered by the art he cannot sufficiently thank and revere it.” Frederick William I. was fond of music, and, during the winter evenings, he caused the airs and choruses of certain favourite operas to be played to him on wind instruments by the band of the Potsdam Guard regiment. During these concerts the musicians, with their desks and lights, stood at one end of the long hall, while the King, sitting quite alone at the other, would sometimes, especially after a good dinner, fall asleep. As a composer and performer, Frederick the Great acquired considerable celebrity, and in his early years his father used contemptuously to call him the “piper,” or the “poetaster”; for, the Queen having caused him to be secretly instructed in playing the flute, the Prince attempted to arrange concerts in the woods when the King was hunting, and, whilst his father rode after the wild boar, the flutes and violins were produced out of the game-bags. One day, the King going into his apartment, the music-master had to be hidden in the chimney. His compositions are very numerous, as he wrote for his own use only as many as one hundred solos for the flute, on which he was a skilful player. When time permitted, he devoted four hours daily to the study or practice of music, a recreation which he enjoyed until within a few years of his death, when he was debarred it through the loss of several of his front teeth. He generally contrived, after taking his coffee in the morning, to play his flute, and these were the moments, as he once confessed to D’Alembert, when his best thoughts occurred to him. Lord Malmesbury wrote from Berlin in the year 1775: “Never was the King in a worse humour: a few days ago the King broke his flute on the head of his chamber hussar, and is very liberal to his servants with cuffs and kicks.” At a concert given during the visit of the Electress-Dowager Maria Antonia of Saxony in 1770, in which this princess, a very distinguished amateur performer, played the piano and sang, the King, supported by his old master, Quantz, played the first lute, the hereditary Prince of Brunswick the first violin, and the Prince of Prussia--afterwards King Frederick William II.--the violoncello.