Baron von Hardenberg is both a learned nobleman and an enlightened statesman, and does equal honour both to his own rank and to the choice of his Prince.  The late Frederick William II. nominated him a Minister of State and a Counsellor of his Cabinet.  On the 26th of January, 1792, as a directorial Minister, he took possession, in the name of the King of Prussia, of the Margravates of Anspach and Bayreuth, and the inhabitants swore before him, as their governor, their oaths of allegiance to their new Sovereign.—­He continued to reside as a kind of viceroy, in these States, until March, 1795, when he replaced Baron von Goltz as negotiator with our republican plenipotentiary in Switzerland; but after settling all differences between Prussia and France, he returned to his former post at Anspach, where no complaints have been heard against his Government.

The ambition of Baron von Hardenberg has always been to obtain the place he now occupies, and the study of his life has been to gain such information as would enable him to fill it with distinction.  I have heard it said that in most countries he had for years kept and paid private agents, who regularly corresponded with him and sent him reports of what they heard or saw of political intrigue or machinations.  One of these his agents I happened to meet with, in 1796, at Basle, and were I to conclude from what I observed in him, the Minister has not been very judicious in his selection of private correspondents.  Figure to yourself a bald-headed personage, about forty years of age, near seven feet high, deaf as a post, stammering and making convulsive efforts to express a sentence of five words, which, after all, his gibberish made unintelligible.  His dress was as eccentric as his person was singular, and his manners corresponded with both.  He called himself Baron von Bulow, and I saw him afterwards, in the autumn of 1797, at Paris, with the same accoutrements and the same jargon, assuming an air of diplomatic mystery, even while displaying before me, in a coffee-house, his letters and instructions from his principal.  As might be expected, he had the adroitness to get himself shut up in the Temple, where, I have been told, the generosity of your Sir Sidney Smith prevented him from starving.

No member of the foreign diplomatic corps here possesses either more knowledge, or a longer experience, than the Prussian Ambassador, Marquis of Lucchesini.  He went with several other philosophers of Italy to admire the late hero of modern philosophy at Berlin, Frederick the Great, who received him well, caressed him often, but never trusted or employed him.  I suppose it was not at the mention of the Marquis’s name for the place of a governor of some province that this Monarch said, “My subjects of that province have always been dutiful; a philosopher shall never rule in my name but over people with whom I am discontented, or whom I intend to chastise.”  This Prince was not unacquainted with the morality of his sectaries.