Page:The Annual Register 1758.djvu/251

 out of the shifting and wavering scales of justice, and poized them equally to all.

Indulgent to the various errors of the human mind, because tainted with so few himself, he has established universal toleration; that decisive characteristic of true religion, natural justice, social benevolence, and even good policy. He equally abhors the guilt of making martyrs, and the folly of making hypocrites.

Greatly above all narrow local prejudices, he has invited and engaged, by a general indiscriminating naturalization, people of all nations to settle in his dominions. He encourages and rewards the industrious, he cherishes and honours the learned; and man as man, wherever oppressed by civil, or persecuted by ecclesiastical tyranny, finds a sure refuge in his sentiments of justice and humanity, which the purple robe has not been able to smother.

A philosopher undazzled with the splendor of the heroic parts of this character, may perhaps inquire after the milder and social virtues of humanity, and seek for the man.He will find both the man and the philosopher too in Frederick, unallayed by the king, and unsullied by the warrior.

A patron of all liberal arts and sciences, and a model of most. In a more particular manner cultivating, adorning and adorned by the belles lettres. His early and first attempt was a refutation of the impious system of Machiavel, that celebrated professor of political iniquity; nobly conscious that he might venture to give the world that public pledge of his future virtue. His memoirs, intended to serve only as materials for a future history of the house of Brandenbourg, are such as must necessarily defeat his own purpose, unless he will write the history too, himself. There are also specimens enough of his poetical genius to shew what he might be as a poet, were he not something greater and better.

Neither the toils of war, nor the cares of government, engross his whole time, but he enjoys a considerable part of it in familiar and easy conversation with his equals, men. There the king is unknown, and what is more, unfelt. Merit is the only distinction, in which his unasserted, but confessed, and undecided superiority, flatters a mind formed like his, much more delicately, than the always casual, and often undeserved, superiority of rank and birth.

But not to swell an essay towards a character, to the bulk of a finished character, still less to that of a history; I will conclude this sketch with this observation: Many a private man might make a great king, but where is the king who could make a great private man, except ?

 

. De Voltaire is below the stature of a tall man, or, in other words, he is a little above those of a middling size: he is extremely thin, and of an adult temperament, hot and atrabilious; his visage is meagre, his aspect