
FORE:Voltaire hated M. Maupertuis. He was the president of the Berlin Academy, and was regarded by Voltaire as a formidable rival. This hatred gave rise to a quarrel between Frederick and Voltaire, which was so virulent that Europe was filled with the noise of their bickerings. M. Maupertuis had published a pamphlet, in which he assumed to have made some important discovery upon the law of action. M. K?nig, a member of the Academy, reviewed the pamphlet, asserting not only that the proclaimed law was false, but that it had been promulgated half a century before. In support of his position he quoted from a letter of Leibnitz. The original of the letter could not be produced. M. K?nig was accused of having forged the extract. M. Maupertuis, a very jealous, irritable man, by his powerful influence as president, caused M. K?nig to be expelled from the Academy.His energy inspired the whole kingdom, and paved the way25 for the achievements of his son. The father created the machine with which the son attained such wonderful results. He commuted the old feudal service into a fixed money payment. He goaded the whole realm into industry, compelling even the apple-women to knit at the stalls. The crown lands were carefully farmed out. He drained bogs, planted colonies, established manufactures, and in every way encouraged the use of Prussian products. He carried with him invariably a stout rattan cane. Upon the slightest provocation, like a madman, he would thrash those who displeased him. He was thoroughly an arbitrary king, ruling at his sovereign will, and disposing of the liberty, the property, and the lives of his subjects at his pleasure. Every year he was accumulating large masses of coin, which he deposited in barrels in the cellar of his palace. He had no powers of graceful speech, but spent his energetic, joyless life in grumbling and growling.

FORE:Hotham, quite indignant, sent this dispatch, dated May 13, to London, including with it a very earnest letter from the Crown Prince to his uncle, in which Fritz wrote:My lord, the court of Vienna has entirely divulged our secret. The Dowager Empress has acquainted the court of Bavaria with it. Wasner, the Austrian minister at Paris, has communicated it to the French minister, Fleury. The Austrian minister at St. Petersburg, M. Linzendorf, has told the court of Russia of it. Sir Thomas Robinson has divulged it to the court of Dresden. Several members of the British government have talked about it publicly.

FORE: Akakia.

FORE:

FORE:The sage Maupertuis, for example, had climbed some tree, or place of impregnability, hoping to see the battle there. And he did see it much too clearly at last! In such a tide of charging and chasing on that Right Wing, and round all the field in the Prussian rear; in such wide bickering and boiling of Horse-currents, which fling out round all the Prussian rear-quarters such a spray of Austrian Hussars for one element, Maupertuis, I have no doubt, wishes much he were at home doing his sines and tangents. An Austrian Hussar party gets sight of him on his tree or other stand-point (Voltaire says elsewhere he was mounted on an ass, the malicious spirit!)too certain the Austrian Hussars got sight of him; his purse, gold watch, all he has of movable, is given frankly; all will not do. There are frills about the man, fine laces, cloth; a goodish yellow wig on him for one thing. Their Slavonic dialect, too fatally intelligible by the pantomime accompanying it, forces sage Maupertuis from his tree or stand-point; the big red face flurried into scarlet, I can fancy, or scarlet and ashy-white mixed; andLet us draw a veil over it. He is next seen shirtless, the once very haughty, blustery, and now much humiliated man; still conscious of supreme acumen, insight, and pure science; and, though an Austrian prisoner and a monster of rags, struggling to believe that he is a genius, and the Trismegistus of mankind. What a pickle!THE BETROTHAL.

FORE:Prince Leopold was keenly wounded by this reproof. Though he uttered not a word in self-defense, he was ever after, in the presence of his majesty, very silent, distant, and reserved. Though scrupulously faithful in every duty, he compelled the king to feel that an impassable wall of separation had risen up between them. He was seeking for an honorable pretext to withdraw from his majestys service.The rich abbeys of the Roman Catholics were compelled to establish manufactures for weaving damasks and table-cloths. Some were converted into oil-mills, or workers in copper, wire-drawers, the flaxes and metals, with water-power, markets, and so on.

FORE:The stunning news soon reached Frederick that General Fouquet, whom he had left in Silesia with twelve thousand men, had been attacked by a vastly superior force of Austrians. The assault was furious in the extreme. Thirty-one thousand Austrians commenced the assault at two oclock in the morning. By eight oclock the bloody deed was done. Ten thousand of the Prussians strewed the field with their gory corpses. Two thousand only escaped. General Fouquet himself was wounded and taken prisoner. To add to the anguish of the king, this disaster was to be attributed to the king himself. He had angrily ordered General Fouquet to adopt a measure which that general, better acquainted with the position and forces of the foe, saw to be fatal. Heroically he obeyed orders, though he knew that it would prove the destruction of his army.Frederick bethinks him that in a late visit to Weimar he had noticed, for his fine qualities, a young gentleman named G?rtz, late tutor to the young Duke Karl August, a wise, firm, adroit-looking young gentleman, who was farther interesting as brother to Lieutenant General Von G?rtz, a respectable soldier of Fredericks. Ex-tutor at Weimar, we say, and idle for the moment; hanging about court there, till he should find a new function.
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