mutual compact.  Against the five millions of Prussia were arrayed populations of more than a hundred million.  The little kingdom was open on all sides to attack, and her enemies were spurred on by the bitterest animosity.  It was thought that one campaign would end the war.  The war lasted seven years, and Prussia came out of it triumphant.  Such a warrior as her indomitable king Europe has rarely seen.  If the Seven Years War made the maritime and colonial greatness of England, it also raised Prussia to the rank of a first-class Power.

Frederic began with a victory, routing the Austrians in one of the fiercest of recorded conflicts, the battle of Prague.  Then in his turn he was beaten at Kolin.  All seemed lost.  The hosts of the coalition were rolling in upon him like a deluge.  Surrounded by enemies, in the jaws of destruction, hoping for little but to die in battle, this strange hero solaced himself with an exhaustless effusion of bad verses, sometimes mournful, sometimes cynical, sometimes indignant, and sometimes breathing a dauntless resolution; till, when his hour came, he threw down his pen to achieve those feats of arms which stamp him one of the foremost soldiers of the world.

The French and Imperialists, in overwhelming force, thought to crush him at Rosbach.  He put them to shameful rout; and then, instead of bonfires and Te Deums, mocked at them in doggerel rhymes of amazing indecency.  While he was beating the French, the Austrians took Silesia from him.  He marched to recover it, found them strongly posted at Leuthen, eighty thousand men against thirty thousand, and without hesitation resolved to attack them.  Never was he more heroic than on the eve of this, his crowning triumph.  “The hour is at hand,” he said to his generals.  “I mean, in spite of the rules of military art, to attack Prince Karl’s army, which is nearly thrice our own.  This risk I must run, or all is lost.  We must beat him or die, all of us, before his batteries.”  He burst unawares upon the Austrian left, and rolled their whole host together, corps upon corps, in a tumult of irretrievable ruin.

While her great ally was reaping a full harvest of laurels, England, dragged into the Continental war because that apple of discord, Hanover, belonged to her King, found little but humiliation.  Minorca was wrested from her, and the Ministry had an innocent man shot to avert from themselves the popular indignation; while the same Ministry, scared by a phantom of invasion, brought over German troops to defend British soil.  But now an event took place pregnant with glorious consequence.  The reins of power fell into the hands of William Pitt.  He had already held them for a brief space, forced into office at the end of 1756 by popular clamor, in spite of the Whig leaders and against the wishes of the King.  But the place was untenable.  Newcastle’s Parliament would not support him; the Duke of Cumberland opposed him; the King hated him; and in April 1757, he was dismissed.