gloomy new provocations of its own before long! Many opinions about
Friedrich, all dim enough: but this, that he is a very demon for
fighting, and the stoutest King walking the Earth just now, may
well be a universal one. A man better not be meddled with, if he
will be at peace, as he professes to wish being.

Friedrich accordingly is not meddled with, or not openly meddled
with; and has, for the Ten or Eleven Years coming, a time of
perfect external Peace. He himself is decided "not to fight with a
cat," if he can get the peace kept; and for about eight years hopes
confidently that this, by good management, will continue possible;
--till, in the last three years, electric symptoms did again
disclose themselves, and such hope more and more died away. It is
well known there lay in the fates a Third Silesian War for him,
worse than both the others; which is now the main segment of his
History still lying ahead for us, were this Halcyon Period done.
Halcyon Period counts from Christmas-day, Dresden, 1745,--"from
this day, Peace to the end of my life!" had been Friedrich's fond
hope. But on the 9th day of September, 1756, Friedrich was again
entering Dresden (Saxony some twelve days before); and the Crowning
Struggle of his Life was, beyond all expectation, found to be still
lying ahead for him, awfully dubious for Seven Years thereafter!--

Friedrich's History during this intervening Halcyon or Peace Period
must, in some way, be made known to readers: but for a great many
reasons, especially at present, it behooves to be given in
compressed form; riddled down, to an immense extent, out of those
sad Prussian Repositories, where the grain of perennial, of
significant and still memorable, lies overwhelmed under rubbish-
mountains of the fairly extinct, the poisonously dusty and