race down to the little events of the day.  Immediately after his accession he had written to Voltaire and invited him to his court.  He had first met the Frenchman in 1740 on a journey near Wesel.  Soon after, Voltaire had come to Berlin for a few days, at heavy expense.  He had even then impressed the King as a jester, but Frederick felt nevertheless an infinite respect for the talent of the man.  Voltaire was to him the greatest poet of all times, the master of ceremonies of Parnassus, where the King himself was so anxious to play a part.  Frederick’s desire to have this man in his train became stronger and stronger.  He regarded himself as his pupil; he wished to have all his verses approved by the master; among his Brandenburg officials he pined for the wit and spirit of the elegant Frenchman, and finally, his vanity as a sovereign was concerned—­he wanted to be a prince of the beaux esprits and philosophers, as he had become a glorious leader of armies.  After the second Silesian war his intimates were mostly foreigners.  After 1750 he had the pleasure of seeing the great Voltaire also as a member of his court.  It was no misfortune that this unworthy man endured for only a few years his sojourn among the barbarians.

During these ten years, from 1746 to 1756, Frederick acquired literary independence, and that importance as a writer which is not yet sufficiently appreciated in Germany.  As to his French poetry, a German can only judge imperfectly.  He was a facile poet, who was easily master of every mood in metre and rhyme, but from the point of view of a Frenchman, he never completely overcame in his lyric poetry the difficulties of a foreign language, however diligently his confidants revised his work.  He even lacked, it seems to us, the uniform rhetorical spirit, that style which in Voltaire’s time was the first mark of a born poet.  The effect of beautiful and noble sentiments, in splendid phraseology, is spoiled by trivial thoughts and commonplace expressions in the next line.  Nor was the development of his taste sufficiently assured and independent.  In his esthetic judgment he was quick, both to admire and to condemn; in reality, he was much more dependent upon the opinion of his French acquaintances than his pride would have admitted.  What was best, moreover, in French poetry at that time—­the return to Nature and the struggle of the beauty of reality against the fetters of an antiquated conventionalism—­remained to him a sealed book.  For a long time he looked upon Rousseau as an eccentric vagabond, and upon the conscientious and accurate spirit of Diderot even as shallow.  And yet it seems to us that there often appear in his poems, especially in the light improvisations which he made to please his friends, a wealth of poetical detail and a charming tone of true feeling, which at least his model Voltaire might have envied.