the Great had in fact created a new standard of monarchy in Germany. Forty
years earlier, Versailles, with its unfeeling splendours, its glorification
of the personal indulgence of the monarch, had been the ideal which, with a
due sense of their own inferiority, the German princes had done their best
to imitate. To be a sovereign was to cover acres of ground with state
apartments, to lavish the revenues of the country upon a troop of
mistresses and adventurers, to patronise the arts, to collect with the same
complacency the masterpieces of ancient painting that adorn the Dresden
Gallery, or an array of valuables scarcely more interesting than the chests
of treasure that were paid for them. In the ecclesiastical States, headed
by the Electorates of Mainz, Treves, and Colgne, the affectations of a
distinctive Christian or spiritual character had long been abandoned. The
prince-bishop and canons, who were nobles appointed from some other
province, lived after the gay fashion of the time, at the expense of a land
in which they had no interest extending beyond their own lifetime. The only
feature distinguishing the ecclesiastical residence from that of one of the
minor secular princes was that the parade of state was performed by monks
in the cathedral instead of by soldiers on the drill-ground, and that even
the pretence of married life was wanting among the flaunting harpies who
frequented a celibate Court. Yet even on the Rhine and on the Moselle the
influence of the great King of Prussia had begun to make itself felt. The
intense and penetrating industry of Frederick was not within the reach of
every petty sovereign who might envy its results; but the better spirit of
the time was seen under some of the ecclesiastical princes in the
encouragement of schools, the improvement of the roads, and a retrenchment
in courtly expenditure. That deeply-seated moral disease which resulted
from centuries of priestly rule was not to be so lightly shaken off. In a
district where Nature most bountifully rewards the industry of man,
twenty-four out of every hundred of the population were monks, nuns, or
beggars. [16]