(the biggest and last volume).] "The sanguine-choleric temperament of Friedrich," says this Doctor, "drove him, in his youth, to sensual enjoyments and wild amusements of different kinds; in his middle age, to fiery enterprises; and in his old years to decisions and actions of a rigorous and vehement nature; yet so that the primary form of utterance, as seen in his youth, never altogether ceased with him.

There are people still among us (1788) who have had, in their own experience, knowledge of his youthful pranks; and yet more are living, who know that he himself, at table, would gayly recount what merry strokes were done by him, or by his order, in those young years.

To give an instance or two.
"While he was at Neu-Ruppin as Colonel of the Infantry Regiment there, the Chaplain of it sometimes waited upon him about the time of dinner,--having been used to dine occasionally with the former Colonel.
The Crown-Prince, however, put him always off, did not ask him to dinner; spoke contemptuously of him in presence of the Officers.

The Chaplain was so inconsiderate, he took to girding at the Crown-Prince in his sermons.

'Once on a time,' preached he, one day, 'there was Herod who had Herodias to dance before him; and he,--he gave her John the Baptist's head for her pains!'" This HEROD, Busching says, was understood to mean, and meant, the Crown-Prince; HERODIAS, the merry corps of Officers who made sport for him; JOHN THE BAPTIST'S HEAD was no other than the Chaplain not invited to dinner! "To punish him for such a sally, the Crown-Prince with the young Officers of his Regiment went, one night, to the Chaplain's house," somewhere hard by, with cow's-grass adjoining to it, as we see: and "first, they knocked in the windows of his sleeping-room upon him [HINGE-windows, glass not entirely broken, we may hope]; next there were crackers [SCHWARMER, "enthusiasts," so to speak!] thrown in upon him; and thereby the Chaplain, and his poor Wife," more or less in an interesting condition, poor woman, "were driven out into the court-yard, and at last into the dung-heap there;"-- and so left, with their Head on a Charger to that terrible extent! That is Busching's version of the story; no doubt substantially correct; of which there are traces in other quarters,--for it went farther than Ruppin; and the Crown-Prince had like to have got into trouble from it.