“The crown lands were farmed out. He drained bogs, planted colonies, established manufactures, and in every way encouraged the use of Prussian products. He carried with him invariably a stout rattan cane. Upon the slightest provocation, like a madman, he would thrash those who displeased him. He was an arbitrary king, ruling at his sovereign will, and disposing of the liberty, the property, and the lives of his subjects at his pleasure. Every year he accumulated large masses of coin, which he deposited in barrels in the cellar of his palace. He had no powers of graceful speech, but spent his energetic, joyless life in grumbling and growling. He would allow no drapery, no stuffed furniture, no carpets in his apartments. He sat upon a plain wooden chair. He ate roughly of roast beef, despising all delicacies. His dress was a close military blue coat, with red cuffs and collar, buff waistcoat and breeches, and white linen gaiters to the knee. His sword was belted around his waist. A well-worn, battered triangular hat covered his head. He walked rapidly through the streets which surrounded his palaces at Potsdam and Berlin. If he met any one, he would abruptly inquire, ‘Who are you?’ When his majesty took a walk, every human being fled before him, as if a tiger had broken loose from a menagerie. If he met a lady in the street, he gave her a kick, and told her to go home and mind her children. If he saw a clergyman staring at the soldiers, he admonished the reverend gentleman to betake himself to study and prayer, and enforced his pious advice by a sound caning administered on the spot. But it was in his own house that he was most unreasonable and ferocious. His palace was hell, and he the most execrable of fiends.” And now we will turn this unlovely picture of the bearish Frederick William to the wall, while we examine a portrait of the young Fritz, afterwards Frederick the Great. In the palace of Berlin, on the 24th of January, 1712, a small infant opened its eyes upon this world. Though small, he was of great promise and possibility, “and thrice and four times welcome to all sovereign and other persons in the Prussian court and Prussian realms in those cold winter days. His father, they say, was like to have stifled him with his caresses, so overjoyed was the man, or at least to have scorched him in the blaze of the fire, when happily some much suitabler female nurse snatched this little creature from the rough paternal paws, and saved it for the benefit of Prussia and mankind.” Then they christened this wee fellow, aged one week, with immense magnificence and pomp of ceremony, Karl Frederick; but the Karl dropped altogether out of practice, and Frederick (_Rich in Peace_) became his only title; until his father became king of Prussia, and Fritz stepped into the rank of crown prince, and subsequently became the most renowned sovereign of his nation, and took his place in the foremost rank of the famous rulers of the world.