History of Friedrich II of Prussia, vol 6 | Page 6

in the arms of
Fabrice, was heard murmuring, "C'EST FAIT DE MOI ('T is all over
with me)!" And "Osnabruck! Osnabruck!" slumberously reiterated he:
To Osnabruck, where my poor old Brother, Bishop as they call him,
once a little Boy that trotted at my knee with blithe face, will have
some human pity on me! So they rushed along all day, as at the gallop,
his few attendants and he; and when the shades of night fell, and speech
had now left the poor man, he still passionately gasped some gurgle of
a sound like "Osnabruck;" --hanging in the arms of Fabrice, and now
evidently in the article of death. What a gallop, sweeping through the
slumber of the world: To Osnabruck, Osnabruck!
In the hollow of the night (some say, one in the morning), they reach
Osnabruck. And the poor old Brother,--Ernst August, once youngest of
six brothers, of seven children, now the one survivor, has human pity in
the heart of him full surely. But George is dead; careless of it now.
[Coxe (i. 266) is "indebted to his friend Nathaniel Wraxall" for these
details,--the since famous Sir Nathaniel, in whose Memoirs
(vague, but NOT mendacious, not unintelligent) they are
now published more at large. See his Memoirs of the Courts of
Berlin, Dresden, &c. (London. 1799), i. 35-40; also
Historical Memoirs (London, 1836), iv. 516-518.]
After sixty-seven years of it, he has flung his big burdens,-- English
crowns, Hanoverian crownlets, sulkinesses, indignations, lean women
and fat, and earthly contradictions and confusions,-- fairly off him; and
lies there.
The man had his big burdens, big honors so called, absurd enough
some of them, in this world; but he bore them with a certain gravity and
discretion: a man of more probity, insight and general human faculty
than he now gets credit for. His word was sacred to him. He had the
courage of a Welf, or Lion-Man; quietly royal in that respect at least.
His sense of equity, of what was true and honorable in men and things,
remained uneffaced to a respectable degree; and surely it had resisted
much. Wilder puddle of muddy infatuations from without and from
within, if we consider it well,--of irreconcilable incoherences,
bottomless universal hypocrisies, solecisms bred with him and imposed

on him,--few sons of Adam had hitherto lived in.
He was, in one word, the first of our Hanover Series of English Kings;
that hitherto unique sort, who are really strange to look at in the History
of the World. Of whom, in the English annals, there is hitherto no
Picture to be had; nothing but an empty blur of discordant nonsenses,
and idle, generally angry, flourishings of the pen, by way of Picture.
The English Nation, having flung its old Puritan, Sword-and-Bible
Faith into the cesspool,--or rather having set its old Bible-Faith,
MINUS any Sword, well up in the organ-loft, with plenty of revenue,
there to preach and organ at discretion, on condition always of
meddling with nobody's practice farther,--thought the same (such their
mistake) a mighty pretty arrangement; but found it hitch before long.
They had to throw out their beautiful Nell-Gwynn Defenders of the
Faith; fling them also into the cesspool; and were rather at a loss what
next to do. "Where is our real King, then? Who IS to lead us
Heavenward, then; to rally the noble of us to him, in some small
measure, and save the rest and their affairs from running
Devilward?"--The English Nation being in some difficulty as to Kings,
the English Nation clutched up the readiest that came to hand; "Here is
our King!" said they,--again under mistake, still under their old mistake.
And, what was singular, they then avenged themselves by mocking,
calumniating, by angrily speaking, writing and laughing at the poor
mistaken King so clutched!--It is high time the English were candidly
asking themselves, with very great seriousness indeed, WHAT it was
they had done, in the sight of God and man, on that and the prior
occasion? And above all, What it is they will now propose to do in the
sequel of it! Dig gold-nuggets, and rally the IGnoble of us?--
George's poor lean Mistress, coming on at the usual rate of the road,
was met, next morning, by the sad tidings. She sprang from her
carriage into the dusty highway; tore her hair (or headdress),
half-frantic; declared herself a ruined woman; and drove direct to
Berlin, there to compose her old mind. She was not ill seen at Court
there; had her connections in the world. Fieldmarshal Schulenburg,
who once had the honor of fighting (not to his advantage) with Charles
XII., and had since grown famous by his Anti-Turk performances in the

Venetian service, is a Brother of this poor