Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/158

148 able, and intensely human picture of a really great man. They recount his foibles, jokes, hemorrhoids, poems, and persiflage. Often the weary head of the state would exclaim to Catt, "What a dog's life I have to lead!". He even had thoughts of resigning the crown to his brother, in order that he might retire to the literary delights of Sans Souci. Catt gives many amusing anecdotes illustrating Frederick's fondness for practical jokes on other people; but there are also plenty of stories evidencing the king's essential generosity and genuine solicitude for the welfare of others. Frederick frequently adverted to his miserable youth and his hard study for the tasks of life, but he seems to have had a more kindly appreciation of his father's severe character than one would gather from the pages of Carlyle or Macaulay.

is really a pity. Here is an excellent book on a subject about which there is little good literature in English, and it is made almost unreadable for us by the incompetence of the translator. He is evidently a foreigner with a large theoretical knowledge of English, but he has no real sense of a clear idiomatic use of the language. The order of his clauses is apt to be clumsy, there are countless inversions, articles are inserted where they do not belong, and omitted where they do (in Russian there are no articles), there are many mistakes in the use of prepositions, and words of all kinds are used with not quite their right meaning and sometimes with totally wrong ones and sometimes with no warrant for their existence. The reader is thus kept in a continual state of irritation while he is trying to find out what a sentence means or should mean, or is jarred by some extraordinary expression. To quote a few examples, we find such terms as "ideational", "hydraulicians", "draining wars", "civilism", "cadet corpuses", "motivated", "the anachronic despoty". Paper money is called "assignations", and we are told about their "course". Instead of he "disapproved of", we have he "regarded negatively". The Academicians, such as Storch, are dubbed "academic Storch", etc.