115.] "The Prussian Army was full of ardor, never abler for fight" (insists Schmettau), which indeed seems to have been the fact on every small occasion;--"but fatally forbidden to try." Not so fatally perhaps, had Schmettau looked beyond his epaulettes: was not the thing, by that slow method, got done?
By the swifter method, awakening a new Seven-Years business, how infinitely costlier might it have been! Schmettau's NARRATIVE, deducting the endless lamentings, especially the extensive didactic digressions, is very clear, ocular, exact; and, in contrast with Friedrich's own, is really amusing to read.

A Schmettau giving us, in his haggard light and oblique point of vision, the naked truth, NAKED and all in a shiver; a Friedrich striving to drape it a little, and make it comfortable to himself.

Those bits of Anecdotes in SCHMETTAU, clear, credible, as if we had seen them, are so many crevices through which it is curiously worth while to look..