Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 2.djvu/57

 FREDERICK THE GREAT 237 ment in Westminster Abbey, and in that venerable pile would have been his last resting-place ; but a mother claimed the ashes of her son, and laid them beside those of his father, in a vault of the parish church of Greenwich. FREDERICK THE GREAT By General John Mitchell (17 1 2-1 786) p ^gl i^jLflfJ?*,! i. ,.^^ l ^p~ "^H^ w^ i^ ^ >*1v 1 j^ 'A^ j^^St^^^^^^Sl^f f ^k m^^wKm ^ ^^^L L ^% /n i^}^ J. -^ /J (kn ^Mkm. ^ ti^l ^ H' ow shall we describe the " Incompar- able," the extraordinary compound of so many brilliant and repulsive qualities ? How is he to be depicted, who was great as a king, and little as a man, always admired in his public, never beloved in his private, character ; a just, generous, and laborious prince, a vain, avaricious, and cold-hearted individual ; luxurious by temperament, tem- perate in practice ; a selfish epicurean, and affecting the harshness of the cynic ; peace- fully disposed, and cultivating the arts of peace, yet exercising the arts of war in their direst form ; a man of letters, ignorant of the beauties, and disdaining the language of his country ; magnificent and mean ; the builder of palaces, theatres, libraries, and mu- seums, and dying, literally, without a whole shirt in which he could be buried ; and, lastly, the most brilliant and successful soldier of his time, and almost des- titute of the soldier's first quality, personal courage? Frederick, by general acclamation surnamed " The Great," was born on Jan- uary 24, 1 71 2. His education was principally military; his very toys were min- iature implements of war suited to his age ; and no sooner was he able to handle a musket than he was sent to drill, and forced, like all the Prussian officers of the period, to perform the duties and submit to the privations of a private soldier, obliged .even to stand sentinel before the palace in all the severities of a northern winter. Though rather feeble of constitution, he soon became a proficient in martial exercises. The different branches of science bearing on the art of war he was forced to study ; but his leisure hours were devoted to reading French verses, and playing on the flute pursuits that greatly displeased his royal father, who frequently threw the books into the fire, and the flutes out of the window, Frederick VViHiam, the original founder of the pipe-clay science of tactics,