We discern with pleasure the old veracity of character shining through this giddy new element; that all these fine procedures are at least unaffected, to a singular degree true, and the product of nature, on his part; and that, in short, the complete respect for Fact, which used to be a quality of his, and which is among the highest and also rarest in man, has on no side deserted him at present.
A trace of airy exuberance, of natural exultancy, not quite repressible, on the sudden change to freedom and supreme power from what had gone before: perhaps that also might be legible, if in those opaque bead-rolls which are called Histories of Friedrich anything human could with certainty be read! He flies much about from place to place; now at Potsdam, now at Berlin, at Charlottenburg, Reinsberg; nothing loath to run whither business calls him, and appear in public: the gazetteer world, as we noticed, which has been hitherto a most mute world, breaks out here and there into a kind of husky jubilation over the great things he is daily doing, and rejoices in the prospect of having a Philosopher King; which function the young man, only twenty-eight gone, cannot but wish to fulfil for the gazetteers and the world.

He is a busy man; and walks boldly into his grand enterprise of "making men happy," to the admiration of Voltaire and an enlightened public far and near.
Bielfeld speaks of immense concourses of people crowding about Charlottenburg, to congratulate, to solicit, to &c.; tells us how he himself had to lodge almost in outhouses, in that royal village of hope, His emotions at Reinsberg, and everybody's, while Friedrich Wilhelm lay dying, and all stood like greyhounds on the slip; and with what arrow-swiftness they shot away when the great news came: all this he has already described at wearisome length, in his fantastic semi-fabulous way.

[Bielfeld, i.

68-77; ib.

81.]' Friedrich himself seemed moderately glad to see Bielfeld; received his high-flown congratulations with a benevolent yet somewhat composed air; and gave him afterwards, in the course of weeks, an unexpectedly small appointment: To go to Hanover, under Truchsess von Waldburg, and announce our Accession.