Yet, though that much is clear, the letter to Algarotti betrays, in more than one direction, a very singular state of mind.  A warm devotion to l’elocution francaise is easy enough to understand; but Frederick’s devotion was much more than warm; it was so absorbing and so intense that it left him no rest until, by hook or by crook, by supplication, or by trickery, or by paying down hard cash, he had obtained the close and constant proximity of—­what?—­of a man whom he himself described as a ‘singe’ and a ‘scelerat,’ a man of base soul and despicable character.  And Frederick appears to see nothing surprising in this.  He takes it quite as a matter of course that he should be, not merely willing, but delighted to run all the risks involved by Voltaire’s undoubted roguery, so long as he can be sure of benefiting from Voltaire’s no less undoubted mastery of French versification.  This is certainly strange; but the explanation of it lies in the extraordinary vogue—­a vogue, indeed, so extraordinary that it is very difficult for the modern reader to realise it—­enjoyed throughout Europe by French culture and literature during the middle years of the eighteenth century.  Frederick was merely an extreme instance of a universal fact.  Like all Germans of any education, he habitually wrote and spoke in French; like every lady and gentleman from Naples to Edinburgh, his life was regulated by the social conventions of France; like every amateur of letters from Madrid to St. Petersburg, his whole conception of literary taste, his whole standard of literary values, was French.  To him, as to the vast majority of his contemporaries, the very essence of civilisation was concentrated in French literature, and especially in French poetry; and French poetry meant to him, as to his contemporaries, that particular kind of French poetry which had come into fashion at the court of Louis XIV.  For this curious creed was as narrow as it was all-pervading.  The Grand Siecle was the Church Infallible; and it was heresy to doubt the Gospel of Boileau.

Frederick’s library, still preserved at Potsdam, shows us what literature meant in those days to a cultivated man:  it is composed entirely of the French Classics, of the works of Voltaire, and of the masterpieces of antiquity translated into eighteenth-century French.  But Frederick was not content with mere appreciation; he too would create; he would write alexandrines on the model of Racine, and madrigals after the manner of Chaulieu; he would press in person into the sacred sanctuary, and burn incense with his own hands upon the inmost shrine.  It was true that he was a foreigner; it was true that his knowledge of the French language was incomplete and incorrect; but his sense of his own ability urged him forward, and his indefatigable pertinacity kept him at his strange task throughout the whole of his life.  He filled volumes, and the contents of those volumes afford probably the most complete illustration in