And truly it would have been more beautiful to everybody, for the moment, to have made matters soft to poor Finck,--had Friedrich ever gone on that score with his Generals and Delegates; which, though the reverse of a cruel man, he never did.

And truly, as we often observe, the Laws of Fact are still severer than Friedrich was:--so that, in the long-run, perhaps it is beautifulest of all for a King, who is just, to be rhadamanthine in important cases.
Exulting Daun, instead of Bohemia for winter-quarters, pushes out now for the prize of Saxony itself.

Daun orders Beck to attack suddenly another Outpost of Friedrich's, which stands rearward of him at Meissen, under a General Dierecke,--the same whom, as Colonel Dierecke, we saw march out of flamy Zittau, summer gone two years.

Beck goes in accordingly, 3d December; attacks Dierecke, not by surprise, but with overwhelming superiority; no reinforcement possible: Dierecke is on the wrong side of the Elbe, no retreat or reinforcement for him; has to fight fiercely all day, Meissen Bridge being in a broken state; then, at night, to ship his people across in Elbe boats, which are much delayed by the floating ice, so that daylight found 1,500 of them still on that northern side; all of whom, with General Dierecke himself, were made prisoners by Beck.

[Tempelhof, iii.