Towards which issue, as Chaplain Muller reports, the Crown-Prince is visibly gravitating, with all his weight and will. The very GNADENWAHL is settled; the young soul (truly a lover of Truth, your Majesty) taps on his ceiling, my floor being overhead, before the winter sun rises, as a signal that I must come down to him; so eager to have error and darkness purged away. Believes himself, as I believe him, ready to undertake that Oath; desires, however, to see it first, that he may maturely study every clause of it.—Say you verily so? answers Majesty. And MAY my ursine heart flow out again, and blubber gratefully over a sinner saved, a poor Son plucked as brand from the burning?"God, the Most High, give His blessing on it, then!" concludes the paternal Majesty: "And as He often, by wondrous guidances, strange paths and thorny steps, will bring men into the Kingdom of Christ, so may our Divine Redeemer help that this prodigal son be brought into His communion. That his godless heart be beaten till it is softened and changed; and so he be snatched from the claws of Satan. This grant us the Almighty God and Father, for our Lord Jesus Christ and His passion and death's sake! Amen!—I am, for the rest, your well-affectioned King, FRIEDRICH WILHELM (WUSTERHAUSEN, 8th NOVEMBER, 1730)." [Forster, i. 379.]

CROWN-PRINCE BEGINS A NEW COURSE.

It was Monday, 6th November, when poor Katte died. Within a fortnight, on the second Sunday after, there has a Select Commission, Grumkow, Borck, Buddenbrock, with three other Soldiers, and the Privy Councillor Thulmeyer, come out to Custrin: there and then, Sunday, November 19th, [Nicolai, exactest of men, only that Documents were occasionally less accessible in his time, gives (ANEKDOTEN, vi. 187), "Saturday, November 25th," as the day of the Oath; but, no doubt, the later inquirers, Preuss (i. 56) and others, have found him wrong in this small instance.] these Seven, with due solemnity, administer the Oath (terms of Oath conceivable by readers); Friedrich being found ready. He signs the Oath, as well as audibly swears it: whereupon his sword is restored to him, and his prison-door opened. He steps forth to the Town Church with his Commissioners; takes the sacrament; listens, with all Custrin, to an illusive Sermon on the subject; "text happily chosen, preacher handling it well." Text was Psalm Seventy-seventh, verse eleventh (tenth of our English version), And I said, This is my infirmity; but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Host High; or, as Luther's version more intelligibly gives it, This I have to suffer; the right hand of the Most High can change all. Preacher (not Muller but another) rose gradually into didactic pathos; Prince, and all Custrin, were weeping, or near weeping, at the close of the business. [Preuss, i. 56.]

Straight from Church the Prince is conducted, not to the Fortress, but to a certain Town Mansion, which he is to call his own henceforth, under conditions: an erring Prince half liberated, and mercifully put on proof again. His first act here is to write, of his own composition, or helped by some official hand, this Letter to his All-serenest Papa; which must be introduced, though, except to readers of German who know the "DERE" (TheirO), "ALLERDURCHLAUCHTIGSTER," and strange pipe-clay solemnity of the Court-style, it is like to be in great part lost in any translation:—

"CUSTRIN, 19th November, 1730.

"ALL-SERENEST AND ALL-GRACIOUSEST FATHER,—To your Royal Majesty, my All-graciousest Father, have,"—I.E. "I have," if one durst write the "I,"—"by my disobedience as TheirO [YourO] subject and soldier, not less than by my undutifulness as TheirO Son, given occasion to a just wrath and aversion against me. With the All-obedientest respect I submit myself wholly to the grace of my most All-gracious Father; and beg him, Most All-graciously to pardon me; as it is not so much the withdrawal of my liberty in a sad arrest (MALHEUREUSEN ARREST), as my own thoughts of the fault I have committed, that have brought me to reason: Who, with all-obedientest respect and submission, continue till my end,

"My All-graciousest King's and Father's faithfully obedientest Servant and Son,

"FRIEDRICH."

[Preuss, i. 56, 57; and Anonymous, Friedrichs des Grossen Briefe an seinen Vater (Berlin, Posen und Bromberg, 1838), p. 3.]

This new House of Friedrich's in the little Town of Custrin, he finds arranged for him on rigorously thrifty principles, yet as a real Household of his own; and even in the form of a Court, with Hofmarschall, Kammerjunkers, and the other adjuncts;—Court reduced to its simplest expression, as the French say, and probably the cheapest that was ever set up. Hafmarschall (Court-marshal) is one Wolden, a civilian Official here. The Kammerjunkers are Rohwedel and Natzmer; Matzmer Junior, son of a distinguished Feldmarschall: "a good-hearted but foolish forward young fellow," says Wilhelmina; "the failure of a coxcomb (PETIT-MAITRE MANQUE)." For example, once, strolling about in a solemn Kaiser's Soiree in Vienna, he found in some quiet corner the young Duke of Lorraine, Franz, who it is thought will be the divine Maria Theresa's husband, and Kaiser himself one day. Foolish Natzmer found this noble young gentleman in a remote corner of the Soiree; went up, nothing loath, to speak graciosities and insipidities to him: the noble young gentleman yawned, as was too natural, a wide long yawn; and in an insipid familiar manner, foolish Natzmer (Wilhelmina and the Berlin circles know it) put his finger into the noble young gentleman's mouth, and insipidly wagged it there. "Sir, you seem to forget where you are!" said the noble young gentleman; and closing his mouth with emphasis, turned away; but happily took no farther notice. [Wilhelmina, i. 310.] This is all we yet know of the history of Natzmer, whose heedless ways and slap-dash speculations, tinted with natural ingenuity and good-humor, are not unattractive to the Prince.

Hofmarschall and these two Kammerjunkers are of the lawyer species; men intended for Official business, in which the Prince himself is now to be occupied. The Prince has four lackeys, two pages, one valet. He wears his sword, but has no sword-tash (PORTE EPEE), much less an officer's uniform: a mere Prince put upon his good behavior again; not yet a soldier of the Prussian Army, only hoping to become so again. He wears a light-gray dress, "HECHTGRAUER (pike-gray) frock with narrow silver cordings;" and must recover his uniform, by proving himself gradually a new man.

For there is, along with the new household, a new employment laid out for him in Custrin; and it shall be seen what figure he makes in that, first of all. He is to sit in the DOMANEN-KAMMER or Government Board here, as youngest Rath; no other career permitted. Let him learn Economics and the way of managing Domain Lands (a very principal item of the royal revenues in this Country): humble work, but useful; which he had better see well how he will do. Two elder Raths are appointed to instruct him in the Economic Sciences and Practices, if he show faculty and diligence;—which in fact he turns out to do, in a superior degree, having every motive to try.

This kind of life lasted with him for the next fifteen months, all through the year 1731 and farther; and must have been a very singular, and was probably a highly instructive year to him, not in the Domain Sciences alone. He is left wholly to himself. All his fellow-creatures, as it were, are watching him. Hundred-eyed Argus, or the Ear of Dionysius, that is to say, Tobacco-Parliament with its spies and reporters,—no stirring of his finger can escape it here. He has much suspicion to encounter: Papa looking always sadly askance, sadly incredulous, upon him. He is in correspondence with Grumkow; takes much advice from Grumkow (our prompter-general, president in the Dionysius'-Ear, and not an ill-wisher farther);