the end of autumn, he retrieved the reverses of the summer, by the brilliant victories of Rosbach, and Leuthen or Lissa. In 1758, Frederic’s contempt of his enemy lulled him into a false security, in consequence of which he was surprised and defeated at Hochkirchen. But the campaigns of 1759 and 1760 were a succession of disasters by which Prussia was reduced to the verge of ruin; and it appears, from Frederic’s correspondence, that, in the autumn of the latter year, his reverses led him to contemplate suicide, in preference to consenting to what he thought dishonourable terms of peace. The next campaign was bloody and indecisive; and in the following year the secession of Russia and France induced Austria, then much exhausted, to consent to a peace, by which Silesia and the other possessions of Frederic were secured to him as he possessed them before the war. So that this enormous expense of blood and treasure produced no result whatever, except that of establishing the King of Prussia’s reputation as the first living general of Europe. Peace was signed at the castle of Hubertsburg, near Dresden, Feb. 15, 1763. The brilliant military reputation which Frederic had acquired in this arduous contest did not tempt him to pursue the career of a conqueror. He had risked every thing to maintain possession of Silesia; but if his writings speak the real feelings of his mind, he was deeply sensible to the sufferings and evils which attend upon war. “The state of Prussia,” he himself says, in the ‘Histoire de mon Temps,’ “can only be compared to that of a man riddled with wounds, weakened by loss of blood, and ready to sink under the weight of his misfortunes. The nobility was exhausted, the commons ruined, numbers of villages were burnt, of towns ruined. Civil order was lost in a total anarchy: in a word, the desolation was universal.” To cure these evils Frederic applied his earnest attention; and by grants of money to those towns which had suffered most; by the commencement and continuation of various great works of public utility; by attention to agriculture; by draining marshes, and settling colonists in the barren, or ruined portions of his country; by cherishing manufactures (though not always with a useful or judicious zeal), he succeeded in repairing the exhausted population and resources of Prussia with a rapidity the more wonderful, because his military establishment was at the same time recruited and maintained at the enormous number, considering the size and wealth of the kingdom, of 200,000 men. One of his measures deserves especial notice, the emancipation of the peasants from hereditary servitude. This great undertaking he commenced at an early period of his reign, by giving up his own seignorial rights over the serfs on the crown domains: he completed it in the year 1766, by an edict abolishing servitude throughout his dominions. In 1765, he commenced a gradual alteration in