his French; what is his morality to me?’ And so a royal statesman may have the manners of the coarsest corporal, and the morality of the grossest cynic, and still have both the eye to discern, and the hand to control, the forces of a great forward movement. Frederick had the signal honour of accepting his position, and taking up with an almost perfect fortitude the burden which it laid upon him. ‘We are not masters of our own lot,’ he wrote to Voltaire, immediately after his accession to the throne; ‘the whirlwind of circumstances carries us away, and we must suffer ourselves to be carried away.’[139] And what he said in this hour of exaltation he did not deny nearly twenty years later, when his fortunes seemed absolutely desperate. ‘If I had been born a private person,’ he wrote to him in 1759, ‘I would give up everything for love of peace; but a man is bound to take on the spirit of his position.’[140] ‘Philosophy teaches us to do our duty, to serve our country faithfully at the price of our blood and our case, to sacrifice for it our whole existence.’[141] Men are also called upon by their country to abstain from sacrificing their existence, and if Frederick’s sense of duty to his subjects had been as perfect as it was exceptionally near being so, he would not have carried a phial of poison round his neck.[142] Still on the whole he devoted himself to his career with a temper that was as entirely calculated for the overthrow of a tottering system, as Voltaire’s own. It is difficult to tell whether Frederick’s steady attention to letters and men of letters, and his praiseworthy endeavours to make Berlin a true academic centre, were due to a real and disinterested love of knowledge, and a sense of its worth to the spirit of man, or still more to weak literary vanity, and a futile idea of universal fame so far as his own productions went, and a purely utilitarian purpose so far as his patronage of the national academy was concerned. One thing is certain, that the philosophy which he learnt from French masters, which Voltaire brought in his proper person to Berlin, and to which Frederick to the end of his days was always adding illustrative commentaries, never made any impression on Germany. The teaching of Leibnitz and Wolf stood like a fortified wall in the face of the French invasion, and whatever effective share French speculation had upon Germany, was through the influence of Descartes upon Leibnitz.