ABSTRACT
Seldom has the death of any Prince been so ardently desired as that of Frederick the Great, the strongest of the Hohenzollerns and the best of the Kings of Prussia; it may strike one as both strange and horrible, but it was the fact. The great King’s successor, his brother Augustus William’s son, like all heirs to a throne, waited for his uncle’s decease more impatiently than anyone. Frederick William II was as pronounced a Don Juan as his uncle had been a mysogynist, as extravagant as Frederick had been parsimonious, as pious and superstitious as Fritz had been freethinking and clear-headed, as easy-going and good-natured as the other had been hard-working and bad-tempered. Notwithstanding his very real love of music Frederick William, who, for all his giant stature, early began to put on flesh, showed a quite unmistakable taste for the low and the vulgar.
