Thereby with diligence he may produce for himself some faint twilight notion of the Flight of Time in remote Brandenburg,--convince himself that remote Brandenburg was present all along, alive after its sort, and assisting, dumbly or otherwise, in the great World-Drama as that went on.
We have to say in general, the history of Brandenburg under the Hohenzollerns has very little in it to excite a vulgar curiosity, though perhaps a great deal to interest an intelligent one.

Had it found treatment duly intelligent;--which, however, how could it, lucky beyond its neighbors, hope to do! Commonplace Dryasdust, and voluminous Stupidity, not worse here than elsewhere, play their Part.
It is the history of a State, or Social Vitality, growing from small to great; steadily growing henceforth under guidance: and the contrast between guidance and no-guidance, or mis-guidance, in such matters, is again impressively illustrated there.

This we see well to be the fact; and the details of this would be of moment, were they given us: but they are not;--how could voluminous Dryasdust give them?
Then, on the other hand, the Phenomenon is, for a long while, on so small a scale, wholly without importance in European politics and affairs, the commonplace Historian, writing of it on a large scale, becomes unreadable and intolerable.

Witness grandiloquent Pauli our fatal friend, with his Eight watery Quartos; which gods and men, unless driven by necessity, have learned to avoid! [Dr.Carl Friedrich Pauli, _Allgemeine Preussische Staats-Geschichte_, often enough cited here.] The Phenomenon of Brandenburg is small, remote; and the essential particulars, too delicate for the eye of Dryasdust, are mostly wanting, drowned deep in details of the unessential.

So that we are well content, my readers and I, to keep remote from it on this occasion.
On one other point I must give the reader warning.