its garish “night-life,” its faultily-faultless municipal propriety, not in Potsdam, “the true cradle of the Prussian army,” as Baedeker, deviating for an instant into metaphor, describes it, but simply in Sans Souci.  He is now no longer in the twentieth century, but the eighteenth—­one hundred and fifty years ago or more—­in Frederick’s day, the period of pigtails, of giant grenadiers in the old-time blue and red coats, the high and fantastic shako made of metal and tapering to a point, of three-cornered hats resting on powdered wigs, of yellow top-boots, and exhaling the general air of ruffianly geniality characteristic of the manners and soldiers of the age.

As our foreigner advances through the park, where, as he is told, the Emperor makes a promenade each Christmas Eve distributing ten-mark pieces (spiteful chroniclers make it three marks) to all and sundry poor, he will notice the fountain “the water of which rises to a height of 130 feet,” with its twelve figures by French artists of the eighteenth century, and ascend the broad terraced flight of marble steps up which the present Crown Prince is credited with once urging his trembling steed—­leading to the Mecca of his imagination, the palace Sans Souci itself.  The building is only one story high, not large, reminding one somewhat of the Trianon at Versailles, though lacking the Trianon’s finished lightness and elegance, yet with its semicircular colonnade distinctly French, and impressive by its elevated situation.  The chief, the enduring, the magical impression, however, begins to form as our foreigner commences his pilgrimage through the rooms in which Frederick passed most of his later years.  As he pauses in the Voltaire Chamber he imagines the two great figures, seated in stiff-backed chairs at a little table on which stand, perhaps, a pair of cut Venetian wine-glasses and a tall bottle of old Rheinish—­the great man of thought and the great man of action, the two great atheists and freethinkers of Europe, with their earnest, sharply featured faces, and their wigs bobbing at each other, discussing the events and tendencies of their time.  And how they must have talked—­no wonder Frederick, though the idol of his subjects, withdrew for such discourse from the society of the day, with its twaddle of the tea-cups and its parade-ground platitudes.

As in our own time, there was then no lack of stimulating topics.  The influence of the old Catholicism and the old feudalism was rapidly diminishing, the night of superstition was passing, and the age of reason, that was to culminate with such tremendous and horrible force in the French Revolution, was beginning to dawn.  The encyclopaedists, with Diderot and d’Alembert in the van, were holding council in France, mobilizing the intellects of the time, and, like Bacon, taking all knowledge for their province, for a fierce attack on the old philosophy, the old statecraft, the old art, and the old religion.  Are such topics and such men to deal with them to be found to-day, or have all the great problems of humanity and its intellect been started, studied, and resolved?  And are motor-cars, aeroplanes, dances, Dreadnoughts, millinery, rag-time reviews, auction bridge, the rise and fall of stocks, and the last extraordinary round of golf, all that is left for the present generation to discuss?