Like Charlemagne, he associated with learned men.  He loved music and literature; and he showed an amazing fortitude and patience in adversity, which called out universal admiration.  He had a great insight into shams, was rarely imposed upon, and was scrupulous and honest in his dealings as an individual.  He was also a fascinating man when he unbent; was affable, intelligent, accessible, and unstilted.  He was an admirable talker, and a tolerable author.  He always sympathized with intellectual excellence.  He surrounded himself with great men in all departments.  He had good taste and a severe dignity, and despised vulgar people; had no craving for fast horses, and held no intercourse with hostlers and gamblers, even if these gamblers had the respectable name of brokers.  He punished all public thieves; so that his administration at least was dignified and respectable, and secured the respect of Europe and the admiration of men of ability.  The great warrior was also a great statesman, and never made himself ridiculous, never degraded his position and powers, and could admire and detect a man of genius, even when hidden from the world.  He was a Tiberius, but not a Nero fiddling over national calamities, and surrounding himself with stage-players, buffoons, and idiots.

But here his virtues ended.  He was cold, selfish, dissembling, hard-hearted, ungrateful, ambitious, unscrupulous, without faith in either God or man; so sceptical in religion that he was almost an atheist.  He was a disobedient son, a heartless husband, a capricious friend, and a selfish self-idolater.  While he was the friend of literary men, he patronized those who were infidel in their creed.  He was not a religious persecutor, because he regarded all religions as equally false and equally useful.  He was social among convivial and learned friends, but cared little for women or female society.  His latter years, though dignified and quiet, an idol in all military circles, with an immense fame, and surrounded with every pleasure and luxury at Sans-Souci, were still sad and gloomy, like those of most great men whose leading principle of life was vanity and egotism,—­like those of Solomon, Charles V., and Louis XIV.  He heard the distant rumblings, if he did not live to see the lurid fires, of the French Revolution.  He had been deceived in Voltaire, but he could not mistake the logical sequence of the ideas of Rousseau,—­those blasting ideas which would sweep away all feudal institutions and all irresponsible tyrannies.  When Mirabeau visited him he was a quaking, suspicious, irritable, capricious, unhappy old man, though adored by his soldiers to the last,—­for those were the only people he ever loved, those who were willing to die for him, those who built up his throne:  and when he died, I suppose he was sincerely lamented by his army and his generals and his nobility, for with him began the greatness of Prussia as a military power.  So far as a life devoted to the military