In bold and splendid contrast with this picture of national life flow the life and fortunes of Frederick.  If the qualities of his progenitors prophesied this right royal course, his portrait, by Pesne, shows him to have been conceived in some happy moment when Nature was in her most generous mood.  What finish of form and feature! and what apparent power to win!  Yet in what serene depths it rests, to be aroused only by some superb challenger!  No strength of thought or stress of situation seems to have had power to line the curves of beauty.  Observe, too, the full-blown mouth, which never saw cause to set itself in order to form or fortify a purpose.  When it is remembered that in opening manhood this prince was long imprisoned under sentence of death for attempting to escape from paternal tyranny, and that his friend actually died on the gallows merely for generous complicity in this offence against the state of a king, and that neither of the terrible facts left permanent trace on his countenance or cloud on his spirit, it should create no surprise that nothing but the march of time was ever visible there.  Though trained in such a school, and in the twenty-eighth year of his age when he reached the throne, he yet gave a whole and a full heart to his subjects, and sought to guide them solely for their good.  From this purpose he never swerved; and though his somewhat too trustful methods were rapidly changed by stern experience, his people felt more and more the consummate wisdom of his guidance, and they became unconquerable by that truth and that faith.  Almost on the first day of his reign, he invited Voltaire, the greatest of literary heroes, the most adroit and successful assaulter of king-craft and priest-craft that ever lived, to his capital and to his palace; and in a most friendly spirit consulted him on the advancement of art and letters, exhausted him by the touchstone of superior capacity, and even fathomed him by a glance so keen and so covert that it always took, but never gave, and then complimented him home in so masterly a manner that he was lured into the fond belief that he had found a disciple.  A mind so capacious and so reticent is always an enigma to near observers.  Hence it is that the transcendently great may be more truly known to after-ages than to any contemporary.  By the patient research and profound insight of Mr. Carlyle, Frederick the Great is thus rising into clear and perennial light.  What deserts of dust he wrought in, and what a jungle of false growths he had to clear away, Dryasdust and Smelfungus mournfully hint and indignantly moralize,—­under such significant names does this new Rhadamanthus reveal the real sins of mankind, and deliver them over to the judgment of their peers.  Frederick, indeed, is among them, but not of them.  The way in which he is made to come forth from the mountains of smoke and cinders remaining of his times is absolutely marvellous.  As some mighty and mysterious necromancer quickens