During these ten years, from 1746 to 1756, Frederick acquired literary independence, and that importance as a writer which is not yet sufficiently appreciated in Germany. As to his French poetry, a German can only judge imperfectly. He was a facile poet, who was easily master of every mood in metre and rhyme, but from the point of view of a Frenchman, he never completely overcame in his lyric poetry the difficulties of a foreign language, however diligently his confidants revised his work. He even lacked, it seems to us, the uniform rhetorical spirit, that style which in Voltaire's time was the first mark of a born poet. The effect of beautiful and noble sentiments, in splendid phraseology, is spoiled by trivial thoughts and commonplace expressions in the next line. Nor was the development of his taste sufficiently assured and independent. In his esthetic judgment he was quick, both to admire and to condemn; in reality, he was much more dependent upon the opinion of his French acquaintances than his pride would have admitted. What was best, moreover, in French poetry at that time--the return to Nature and the struggle of the beauty of reality against the fetters of an antiquated conventionalism--remained to him a sealed book. For a long time he looked upon Rousseau as an eccentric vagabond, and upon the conscientious and accurate spirit of Diderot even as shallow. And yet it seems to us that there often appear in his poems, especially in the light improvisations which he made to please his friends, a wealth of poetical detail and a charming tone of true feeling, which at least his model Voltaire might have envied. Frederick's history of his times is, like Cæsar's _Commentaries_, one of the most important documents of historical literature. True, like the Roman general, like all practical statesmen, he stated facts as they are reflected in the soul of a participant. He does not give due value to everything or full justice to everybody, but he knows infinitely more than is revealed to one at a distance, and he wrote of some of the motives underlying the great events, not without prejudice, yet with magnanimity toward his opponents. Writing at times without the enormous reference material which a professional historian must collect about him, he was occasionally deceived by his memory and his judgment, though both were very reliable. He was, moreover, composing an apology for his house, his politics, his campaigns; and, like Cæsar, he sometimes ignores facts or interprets them as he wishes them to go down to posterity; but his love of truth and the frankness with which he treats his house and his own actions are no less admirable than his sovereign calm and the ease with which he soars above events, in spite of the little rhetorical embellishments which were due to the taste of his time.