“When in August, 1736, Voltaire received the first letter from the Crown Prince of Prussia he was in his forty-second year. The writer was 24 years old. Voltaire was famed throughout Europe and looked upon as the most important author of the period. Frederick was a young prince, unknown except for what he had gone through. He had had to suffer for his inclination and peculiar intellectuality, just as Voltaire had to pay a price for his wit and the revolutionary might of his thinking. Both had been the victims of the brutality of the time and the arbitrariness of the system of government. “The father of Frederick, whom Carlyle idealized, in spite of all his good qualities as organizer, was restive and quick tempered; with all his rectitude often raw and cruel. He had prescribed an educational program for his son that excluded everything unnecessary, among this Latin and literature. The King detested everything foreign. If he permitted French this was simply because German was then scarcely considered a language. He took pleasure in personally giving his subjects a beating on the street in case the one or other incident gave him dissatisfaction. “When Frederick as a youth studied forbidden things, got into debt, cared nothing for parades of the troops, the father demanded that he should renounce his right to the throne. When he refused he was treated barbarously, called a coward because he did not resist. In 1730 he made an attempt to escape to England. But an intercepted letter to his friend Katte revealed the scheme to the King. Again he was treated abominably and a court-martial was appointed for the purpose of sentencing him to death. That was the custom of the time. Twelve years before, Peter the Great had his son Alexei beaten to death and he himself wielded the knout. When the Prussian court-martial failed to act as blindly as the Russian the King had the prince put in prison in Kuestrin.” Passing over the years intervening between that earlier time and when Frederick ascended the throne, May 31, 1740, a period replete with letter writing and exchange of compliments describing in Brandes’ inimitable manner, the Danish critic tells of Frederick’s joy that now at last he can come face to face with the object of his admiration. “Frederick, in spite of the many things to occupy him, makes his debut as a true disciple of Voltaire,” declares Brandes. “His first act is the doing away with torture as punishment, the dissolution of the Potsdam guard, the guard that the father had hired, secured at whatever cost, and calling back a thinker like Wolff to become once more professor at Halle.”