Macaulay is not an FW fan! To the point where the editor of my 1882 volume feels the need to add a footnote saying Macaulay is being unduly harsh. Macaulay apparently had some Daddy issues himself, according to an article I read that argued that while Carlyle's tastes and opinions occasionally overlap with FW's more than Fritz's and it shows (something I had noticed), Macaulay was the freethinking son of a pious father and might have identified with Fritz's struggles. Frederick was succeeded by his son, Frederick William, a prince who must be allowed to have possessed some talents for administration, but whose character was disfigured by the most odious vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never been seen out of a mad-house. He hated infidels, Papists, and metaphysicians, and did not very well understand in what they differed from each other. The business of life, according to him, was to drill and to be drilled. The recreations suited to a prince were to sit in a cloud of tobacco smoke, to sip Swedish beer between the puffs of the pipe, to play backgammon for three halfpence a rubber, to kill wild hogs, and to shoot partridges by the thousand. The history of [Fritz's] boyhood is painfully interesting. Oliver Twist in the parish work-house, Smike at Dotheboys Hall, were petted children when compared with this wretched heir-apparent of a crown. FW putting an end to Fritz's Latin education:
Up went the king's cane, away ran the terrified instructor, and Frederick's classical studies ended forever. He now and then affected to quote Latin sentences, and produced such exquisite Ciceronian phrases as these: "Stante pede morire"—"De gustibus non est disputandus"— "Tot verbas tot spondera."
The second two of those are ungrammatical attempts to render Latin sayings. The first one I didn't recognize, but Googling seems to indicate that it's a translation into Latin of a saying that's found in various Germanic languages. So possibly, if it's not apocryphal, something Fritz knew from German. The love that dare not speak its name:
Things became worse when the Prince-Royal attained that time of life at which the great revolution in the human mind and body takes place [i.e. adolescence].- He was guilty of some youthful indiscretions, which no good and wise parent would regard with severity. At a later period he was accused, truly or falsely, of vices from which History averts her eyes and which even satire blushes to name—vices such that, to borrow the energetic language of Lord-Keeper Coventry, "the depraved nature of man, which of itself carrieth man to all other sin, abhorreth them." But the offenses of his youth were not characterized by any peculiar turpitude. They excited, however. transports of rage in the king, who hated all faults except those to which he was him self inclined, and who conceived that he made ample atonement to Heaven for his brutality, by holding the softer passions in detestation. The king suspected that his son was inclined to be a heretic of some sort or other, whether Calvinist or Atheist, his majesty did not very well know. The ordinary malignity of Frederick William was bad enough. He now thought malignity a part of his duty as a Christian man, and all the conscience that he had stimulated his hatred. Once his father knocked him down, dragged him along the floor to a window, and was with difficulty prevented from strangling him with the cord of the curtain. The queen, for the crime of not wishing to see her son murdered, was subjected to the grossest indignities. The prince was an officer in the army; his flight was therefore desertion, and, in the moral code of Frederick William, desertion was the highest of all crimes. "Desertion," says this royal theologian in one of his half-crazy letters, "is from hell." [Fritz] remained, however, long a prisoner; but he was not on that account to be pitied. He found in his jailors a tenderness which he had never found in his father; his table was not sumptuous, but he had wholesome food in sufficient quantity to appease hunger; he could read the Henriade without being kicked, and play on his flute without having it broken over his head. Fritz ascends to the throne:
It soon became plain that, in the most important points, the new sovereign bore a strong family likeness to his predecessor. There was a wide difference be tween the father and the son as respected extent and vigor of intellect, speculative opinions, amusements, studies, outward demeanor. But the groundwork of the character was the same in both. To both were common the love of order, the love of business, the military taste, the parsimony, the imperious spirit, the temper irritable even to ferocity, the pleasure in the pain and humiliation of others. But these propensities had in Frederick William partaken of the general unsoundness of his mind, and wore a very different aspect when found in company with the strong and cultivated understand ing of his successor. Thus, for example, Frederick was as anxious as any prince could be about the efficacy of his army. But this anxiety never degenerated into a monomania, like that which led his father to pay fancy prices for giants. Frederick was as thrifty about money as any prince or any private man ought to be. But he did not conceive, like his father, that it was worth while to eat unwholesome cabbages for the sake of saving four or five rix dollars in the year.
Frederick was, we fear, as malevolent as his father; but Frederick's wit enabled him often to show his malevolence in ways more decent than those to which his father resorted, and to inflict misery and degradation by a taunt instead of blow. Frederick it is true by no means relinquished his hereditary privilege of kicking and cudgelling. His practice, however, as to that matter differed in some important respects from his father's. To Frederick William, the mere circumstance that any persons whatever, men, women, or children, Prussians or foreigners, were within reach of his toes and of his cane, appeared to be a sufficient reason for proceeding to belabor them. Frederick required provocation as well as vicinity; nor was he ever known to inflict this paternal species of correction on any but his born subjects; though on one occasion M. Thiebault had reason during a few seconds to anticipate the high honor of being an exception to this general rule.
Re: Macaulay - FW
Frederick was succeeded by his son, Frederick William, a prince who must be allowed to have possessed some talents for administration, but whose character was disfigured by the most odious vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never been seen out of a mad-house.
He hated infidels, Papists, and metaphysicians, and did not very well understand in what they differed from each other. The business of life, according to him, was to drill and to be drilled. The recreations suited to a prince were to sit in a cloud of tobacco smoke, to sip Swedish beer between the puffs of the pipe, to play backgammon for three halfpence a rubber, to kill wild hogs, and to shoot partridges by the thousand.
The history of [Fritz's] boyhood is painfully interesting. Oliver Twist in the parish work-house, Smike at Dotheboys Hall, were petted children when compared with this wretched heir-apparent of a crown.
FW putting an end to Fritz's Latin education:
Up went the king's cane, away ran the terrified instructor, and Frederick's classical studies ended forever. He now and then affected to quote Latin sentences, and produced such exquisite Ciceronian phrases as these: "Stante pede morire"—"De gustibus non est disputandus"— "Tot verbas tot spondera."
The second two of those are ungrammatical attempts to render Latin sayings. The first one I didn't recognize, but Googling seems to indicate that it's a translation into Latin of a saying that's found in various Germanic languages. So possibly, if it's not apocryphal, something Fritz knew from German.
The love that dare not speak its name:
Things became worse when the Prince-Royal attained that time of life at which the great revolution in the human mind and body takes place [i.e. adolescence].- He was guilty of some youthful indiscretions, which no good and wise parent would regard with severity. At a later period he was accused, truly or falsely, of vices from which History averts her eyes and which even satire blushes to name—vices such that, to borrow the energetic language of Lord-Keeper Coventry, "the depraved nature of man, which of itself carrieth man to all other sin, abhorreth them." But the offenses of his youth were not characterized by any peculiar turpitude. They excited, however. transports of rage in the king, who hated all faults except those to which he was him self inclined, and who conceived that he made ample atonement to Heaven for his brutality, by holding the softer passions in detestation.
The king suspected that his son was inclined to be a heretic of some sort or other, whether Calvinist or Atheist, his majesty did not very well know. The ordinary malignity of Frederick William was bad enough. He now thought malignity a part of his duty as a Christian man, and all the conscience that he had stimulated his hatred.
Once his father knocked him down, dragged him along the floor to a window, and was with difficulty prevented from strangling him with the cord of the curtain. The queen, for the crime of not wishing to see her son murdered, was subjected to the grossest indignities.
The prince was an officer in the army; his flight was therefore desertion, and, in the moral code of Frederick William, desertion was the highest of all crimes. "Desertion," says this royal theologian in one of his half-crazy letters, "is from hell."
[Fritz] remained, however, long a prisoner; but he was not on that account to be pitied. He found in his jailors a tenderness which he had never found in his father; his table was not sumptuous, but he had wholesome food in sufficient quantity to appease hunger; he could read the Henriade without being kicked, and play on his flute without having it broken over his head.
Fritz ascends to the throne:
It soon became plain that, in the most important points, the new sovereign bore a strong family likeness to his predecessor. There was a wide difference be tween the father and the son as respected extent and vigor of intellect, speculative opinions, amusements, studies, outward demeanor. But the groundwork of the character was the same in both. To both were common the love of order, the love of business, the military taste, the parsimony, the imperious spirit, the temper irritable even to ferocity, the pleasure in the pain and humiliation of others. But these propensities had in Frederick William partaken of the general unsoundness of his mind, and wore a very different aspect when found in company with the strong and cultivated understand ing of his successor. Thus, for example, Frederick was as anxious as any prince could be about the efficacy of his army. But this anxiety never degenerated into a monomania, like that which led his father to pay fancy prices for giants. Frederick was as thrifty about money as any prince or any private man ought to be. But he did not conceive, like his father, that it was worth while to eat unwholesome cabbages for the sake of saving four or five rix dollars in the year.
Frederick was, we fear, as malevolent as his father; but Frederick's wit enabled him often to show his malevolence in ways more decent than those to which his father resorted, and to inflict misery and degradation by a taunt instead of blow. Frederick it is true by no means relinquished his hereditary privilege of kicking and cudgelling. His practice, however, as to that matter differed in some important respects from his father's. To Frederick William, the mere circumstance that any persons whatever, men, women, or children, Prussians or foreigners, were within reach of his toes and of his cane, appeared to be a sufficient reason for proceeding to belabor them. Frederick required provocation as well as vicinity; nor was he ever known to inflict this paternal species of correction on any but his born subjects; though on one occasion M. Thiebault had reason during a few seconds to anticipate the high honor of being an exception to this general rule.