When you sent me, inclosed in your letter, those verses for our Marcus Aurelius of the North, I fully intended to pay my court to him with them. He was at that time to have come to Brussels incognito. But the quartan fever, which unhappily he still has, deranged all his projects. He has sent me a courier to Brussels, and so I set out to find him in the neighborhood of Cleves.FRITZ IN HIS LIBRARY.
FORE:There has been a revolution in St. Petersburg. The Czar Peter III., your majestys devoted friend, has been deposed, and probably assassinated. The Czarina Catharine, influenced by the enemies of your majesty, and unwilling to become embroiled in a conflict with Austria and France, has ordered me to return instantly homeward with the twenty thousand troops under my command.
CHAPTER XVI. THE CONQUEST OF SILESIA.The king approved of the first two sentences of the court. The mildness of the last roused his indignation. Katte, he exclaimed, is guilty of high treason. He shall die by the sword of the headsman. It is better that he should die than that justice depart out of the world. His doom was thus fixed as irreversible as fate.The Crown Prince Frederick had married the daughter of the Duke of Brunswick. She was a very beautiful, proud, high-spirited woman. Her husband was a worthless fellow, dissolute in the extreme. She, stung to madness, and unrestrained by Christian537 principle, retaliated in kind. A divorce was the result. The discarded princess retired to the castle of Stettin, where she lived in comparative seclusion, though surrounded with elegance.