festeggianti.  What shades of his armed ancestors of the House of Brandenburg will the committee of Illumines raise up in the opera-house of Berlin, to dance a grand ballet in the rejoicings for this auspicious event?  Is it a grand master of the Teutonic order, or is it the great Elector?  Is it the first king of Prussia, or the last? or is the whole long line (long, I mean, a parte ante) to appear like Banquo’s royal procession in the tragedy of Macbeth?

How can I prevent all these arts of royal policy, and all these displays of royal magnificence?  How can I prevent the successor of Frederick the Great from aspiring to a new, and, in this age, unexampled kind of glory?  Is it in my power to say that he shall not make his confessions in the style of St. Austin or of Rousseau? that he shall not assume the character of the penitent and flagellant, and, grafting monkery on philosophy, strip himself of his regal purple, clothe his gigantic limbs in the sackcloth and the hair-shirt, and exercise on his broad shoulders the disciplinary scourge of the holy order of the Sans-Culottes?  It is not in me to hinder kings from making new orders of religious and martial knighthood.  I am not Hercules enough to uphold those orbs which the Atlases of the world are so desirous of shifting from their weary shoulders.  What can be done against the magnanimous resolution of the great to accomplish the degradation and the ruin of their own character and situation?

What I say of the German princes, that I say of all the other dignities and all the other institutions of the Holy Roman Empire.  If they have a mind to destroy themselves, they may put their advocates to silence and their advisers to shame.  I have often praised the Aulic Council.  It is very true, I did so.  I thought it a tribunal as well formed as human wisdom could form a tribunal for coercing the great, the rich, and the powerful,—­for obliging them to submit their necks to the imperial laws, and to those of Nature and of nations:  a tribunal well conceived for extirpating peculation, corruption, and oppression from all the parts of that vast, heterogeneous mass, called the Germanic body.  I should not be inclined to retract these praises upon any of the ordinary lapses into which human infirmity will fall; they might still stand, though some of their conclusums should taste of the prejudices of country or of faction, whether political or religious.  Some degree even of corruption should not make me think them guilty of suicide; but if we could suppose that the Aulic Council, not regarding duty or even common decorum, listening neither to the secret admonitions of conscience nor to the public voice of fame, some of the members basely abandoning their post, and others continuing in it only the more infamously to betray it, should give a judgment so shameless and so prostitute, of such monstrous and even portentous corruption, that no example in the history of human depravity,