empire and for that of her constitution"; the intercession of the
Russian court, which had so lately annihilated Poland!

Shortly after this, A.D. 1797, Frederick William II., who had, on his
accession to the throne, found seventy-two millions of dollars in the
treasury, expired, leaving twenty-eight millions of debts. His son,
Frederick William III., placed the Countess Lichtenau under arrest,
banished Wollner, and abolished the unpopular monopoly in tobacco, but
retained his father's ministers and continued the alliance, so
pregnant with mischief, with France.--This monarch, well-meaning and
destined to the severest trials, educated by a peevish valetudinarian
and ignorant of affairs, was first taught by bitter experience the
utter incapacity of the men at that time at the head of the
government, and after, as will be seen, completely reforming the
court, the government, and the army, surrounded himself with men, who
gloriously delivered Prussia and Germany from all the miseries and
avenged all the disgrace, which it is the historian's sad office to
record.

Austria, as Prussia had already done by the treaty of Basel, also
sacrificed, by the peace of Campo Formio, the whole of the left bank
of the Rhine and abandoned it to France, the loss thereby suffered by
the Estates of the empire being indemnified by the secularization of
the ecclesiastical property in the interior of Germany and by the
prospect of the seizure of the imperial free towns. Mayence was ceded
without a blow to France. Holland was forgotten. The English, under
pretext of opposing France, destroyed, A.D. 1797, the last Dutch
fleet, in the Texel, though not without a heroic and determined
resistance on the part of the admirals de Winter and Reintjes, both of
whom were severely wounded, and the latter died in captivity in