Frederick had worn the crown only a few months when the Emperor Charles VI. died.  Now everything urged the young King to risk a master-stroke.  That he determined upon such a step was in itself, in spite of the momentary weakness of Austria, a token of bold courage.  The countries which he ruled had perhaps a seventh as many inhabitants as the broad lands of Maria Theresa.  True, his army was for the time being far superior to the Austrian in numbers and discipline, and according to the ideas of the time, the mass of the people was not then in the same way as today available for recruiting purposes.  Nor did he fully realize the greatness of Maria Theresa.  But even in the preparations for the invasion the King showed that he had long hoped to measure himself against Austria.  In an exalted mood he entered upon a struggle which was to be decisive for his own life and that of his State.  He cared little at heart for the right which he might have to the Silesian duchies, and which with his pen he tried to prove before Europe.  For this the policy of the despotic States of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had no regard whatever.  Any one who could find a plausible defense of his cause made use of it, but in case of need the most improbable argument, the most shallow pretext, was sufficient.  In this way Louis XIV. had made war; in this way the Emperor had followed up his interests against the Turks, Italians, Germans, French, and Spaniards; in this way a great part of the successes of the great Elector had been frustrated by others.  Just where the rights of the Hohenzollerns were the plainest, as in Pomerania, they had been most ruthlessly curtailed, and by no one more than by the Emperor and the Hapsburgs.  Now the Hohenzollerns sought their revenge.  “Be my Cicero and prove the right of my cause, and I will be your Caesar and carry it through,” Frederick wrote to Jordan after the invasion of Silesia.  Gaily, with light step as if going to a dance, the King entered upon the fields of his victories.  There was still cheerful enjoyment of life, sweet coquetry with verse, and intellectual conversation with his intimates on the pleasures of the day, on God, nature, and immortality, which he considered the spice of life.  But the great task upon which he had entered began to have its effect upon his soul even in the early weeks, even before he had passed through the fiery ordeal of the first great battle.  And from that time on it hammered and forged upon his soul until it turned his hair gray and hardened his fiery heart into ringing steel.  With that wonderful clearness which was peculiar to him, he watched the beginning of these changes.  He even then viewed his own life as from without.  “You will find me more philosophical than you think,” he writes to his friend.  “I have always been so—­sometimes more, sometimes less.  My youth, the fire of passion, the longing for glory, and, to tell you the whole truth, curiosity, and finally, a secret instinct, have forced me out of the sweet peace which I enjoyed, and the wish to see my name in the gazettes and in history has led me into new paths.  Come here to me.  Philosophy will maintain her rights, and I assure you that if I had not this cursed love of fame, I should think only of peaceful comfort.”