Nicolai's _Anekdoten_ alone, which are not included in this Hildebrandt Collection, are of sure authenticity; the rest, occasionally true, and often with a kind of MYTHIC truth in them worth attending to, are otherwise of all degrees of dubiety, down to the palpably false and absurd.] Mournful state of the Catholic Religion so called! How long must these wretched Monks go on doing their lazy thrice-deleterious torpid blasphemy; and a King, not histrionic but real, merely signify that he laughs at them and it?
Meseems a heavier whip than that of satire might be in place here, your Majesty?
The lighter whip is easier;--Ah yes, undoubtedly! cry many men.

But horrible accounts are running up, enough to sink the world at last, while the heavier whip is lazily withheld, and lazy blasphemy, fallen torpid, chronic, and quite unconscious of being blasphemous, insinuates itself into the very heart's-blood of mankind! Patience, however; the heavy whip too is coming,--unless universal death be coming.

King Friedrich is not the man to wield such whip.

Quite other work is in store for King Friedrich; and Nature will not, by any suggestion of that terrible task, put him out in the one he has.

He is nothing of a Luther, of a Cromwell; can look upon fakirs praying by their rotatory calabash, as a ludicrous platitude; and grin delicately as above, with the approval of his wiser contemporaries.
Speed to him on his own course! What answer Friedrich found to his English proposals,--answer due here on the 24th from Captain Dickens,--I do not pointedly learn; but can judge of it by Harrington's reply to that Despatch of Dickens's, which entreated candor and open dealing towards his Prussian Majesty.
Harrington is at Herrenhausen, still with the Britannic Majesty there; both of them much at a loss about their Spanish War, and the French and other aspects upon it: "Suppose his Prussian Majesty were to give himself to France against us!" We will hope, not.