No doubt a glad incident, irradiating, as with a sudden sunburst in gray weather, the commonplace of things. Here is news worth listening to; news as from the empyrean! Free interchange of poetries and proses, of heroic sentiments and opinions, between the Unique of Sages and the Paragon of Crown-Princes; how charming to both! Literary business, we perceive, is brisk on both hands;at Cirey the Discours sur l'Homme ("Sixth DISCOURS" arrives in this packet at Loo, surely a deathless piece of singing); nor is Reinsberg idle: Reinsberg is copiously doing verse, such verse! and in prose, very earnestly, an "ANTI-MACHIAVEL;" which soon afterwards filled all the then world, though it has now fallen so silent again. And at Paris, as Voltaire announces with a flourish, "M. de Maupertuis's excellent Book, Figure de la T'erre, is out;" [Paris, 1738: Maupertuis's "measurement of a degree," in the utmost North, 1736-1737 (to prove the Earth flattened there). Vivid Narrative;somewhat gesticulative, but duly brief. The only Book of that great Maupertuis which is now readable to human nature.] M. de Maupertuis, home from the Polar regions and from measuring the Earth there; the sublimest miracle in Paris society at present.
Might build, new-build, an ACADEMY OF SCIENCES at Berlin for your Royal Highness, one day? suggests Voltaire, on this occasion:
and Friedrich, as we shall see, takes the hint. One passage of the Crown-Prince's Answer is in these terms;--fixing this Loo visit to its date for us, at any rate:--"LOO IN HOLLAND, 6th AUGUST, 1739. ... I write from a place where there lived once a great man [William III. of England, our Dutch William]; which is now the Prince of Orange's House. The demon of Ambition sheds its unhappy poisons over his days. He might be the most fortunate of men; and he is devoured by chagrins in his beautiful Palace here, in the middle of his gardens and of a brilliant Court. It is pity in truth; for he is a Prince with no end of wit (INFINIMENT D'ESPRIT), and has respectable qualites."Not Stadtholder, unluckily; that is where the shoe pinches;the Dutch are on the Republican tack, and will not have a Stadtholder at present. No help for it in one's beautiful gardens and avenues of oak and linden.
"I have talked a great deal about Newton with the Princess,"--about Newton; never hinted at Amelia; not permissible!--"from Newton we passed to Leibnitz; and from Leibnitz to the Late Queen of England," Caroline lately gone, "who, the Prince told me, was of Clarke's sentiment" on that important theological controversy now dead to mankind.--And of Jenkins and his Ear did the Princess say nothing? That is now becoming a high phenomenon in England!
But readers must wait a little.
Pity that we cannot give these two Letters in full; that no reader, almost, could be made to understand them, or to care for them when understood. Such the cruelty of Time upon this Voltaire-Friedrich Correspondence, and some others; which were once so rosy, sunny, and are now fallen drearily extinct,--studiable by Editors only! In itself the Friedrich-Voltaire Correspondence, we can see, was charming; very blossomy at present: businesses increasing; mutual admiration now risen to a great height,--admiration sincere on both sides, most so on the Prince's, and extravagantly expressed on both sides, most so on Voltaire's.
CROWN-PRINCE BECOMES A FREEMASON; AND IS HARANGUED BYMONSIEUR DE BIELFELD.
His Majesty, we said, had three pleasant days at Loo; discoursing, as with friends, on public matters, or even on more private matters, in a frank unconstrained way. He is not to be called "Majesty" on this occasion; but the fact, at Loo, and by the leading Mightinesses of the Republic, who come copiously to compliment him there, is well remembered. Talk there was, with such leading Mightinesses, about the Julich-and-Berg question, aim of this Journey: earnest enough private talk with some of them:
but it availed nothing; and would not be worth reporting now to any creature, if we even knew it. In fact, the Journey itself remains mentionable chiefly by one very trifling circumstance;and then by another, not important either, which followed out of that. The trifling circumstance is,--That Friedrich, in the course of this Journey, became a Freemason: and the unimportant sequel was, That he made acquaintance with one Bielfeld, on the occasion;who afterwards wrote a Book about him, which was once much read, though never much worth reading, and is still citable, with precaution, now and then. [Monsieur le Baron de Bielfeld,
Lettres Familieres et Autres, 1763;--second edition, 2 vols. a Leide, 1767, is the one we use here.] Trifling circumstance, of Freemasonry, as we read in Bielfeld and in many Books after him, befell in manner following.
