more stubborn of humor. The First Nation of the Universe, rashly
hurling its fine-throated hunting-pack, or Army of the Oriflamme,
into Austria,--see what a sort of badgers, and gloomily indignant
bears, it has awakened there! Friedrich had to take arms again;
and an unwelcome task it was to him, and a sore and costly.
We shall be obliged (what is our grand difficulty in this History)
to note, in their order, the series of European occurrences;
and, tedious as the matter now is, keep readers acquainted with the
current of that big War; in which, except Friedrich broad awake,
and the Ear of Jenkins in somnambulancy, there is now next to
nothing to interest a human creature.

It is an error still prevalent in England, though long since
exploded everywhere else, that Friedrich wanted new wars, "new
successful robberies," as our Gazetteers called them; and did
wilfully plunge into this War again, in the hope of again doing a
stroke in that kind. English readers, on consulting the facts a
little, will not hesitate to sweep that notion altogether away.
Shadow of basis, except in their own angry uninformed imaginations,
they will find it never had; and that precisely the reverse is
manifest in Friedrich's History. A perfectly clear-sighted
Friedrich; able to discriminate shine from substance;
and gravitating always towards the solid, the actual. That of
"GLOIRE," which he owns to at starting, we saw how soon it died
out, choked in the dire realities. That of Conquering Hero, in the
Macedonia's-madman style, was at all times far from him, if the
reader knew it,--perhaps never farther from any King who had such
allurements to it, such opportunities for it. This his First
Expedition to Silesia--a rushing out to seize your own stolen
horse, while the occasion answered--was a voluntary one; produced,