This dislike to a mild and pacific monarch was surprising. As there is
nothing in the character of Napoleon unworthy of historical remembrance,
it is worth while to examine the cause of it. Some persons trace back
the origin of it to the rejection which he experienced, when First
Consul, from Louis XVIII. of the propositions which he made to him
through the medium of the king of Prussia; and they suppose that
Napoleon laid the blame of this refusal upon the mediator. Others
attribute it to the seizure of Rumbold, the English agent at Hamburgh,
by the orders of Napoleon, and to his being compelled to give him up by
Frederick, as protector of the neutrality of the north of Germany.
Before that time, Frederick and Napoleon had carried on a secret
correspondence, which was of so intimate a nature, that they used to
confide to each other even the details of their household; that
circumstance, it is said, put an end to it.

At the beginning of 1805, however, Russia, Austria, and England, made
ineffectual attempts to engage Frederick in their third coalition
against France. The court of Berlin, the queen, the princes, the
minister Hardenberg, and all the young Prussian military, excited by the
ardour of displaying the inheritance of glory which had been left them
by the great Frederick, or by the wish of blotting out the disgrace of
the campaign of 1792, entered heartily into the views of the allied
powers; but the pacific policy of the king, and of his minister
Haugwitz, resisted them, until the violation of the Prussian territory,
near Anspach, by the march of a corps of French troops, exasperated the
passions of the Prussians to such a degree, that their cry for immediate
war prevailed.

Alexander was then in Poland; he was invited to Potsdam, and repaired