ABSTRACT
Frederick William I came to be the beau ideal of all the secondary-school masters and poetasters in Germany and the sacred duty of obedience and self-subordination to a higher power. When he had Royal visitors he would hale them off with scant ceremony to his den, where it was his standing joke to make them drunk on dark Ducksteiner beer quaffed from huge brown covered tankards, or sick from smoking tobacco in Dutch clay-pipes—a simple, if rough, amusement, of which this model of Prussian monarchs never wearied. With all his wrongheadedness Frederick William I could be clear-sighted enough at times, and even handle people who affected his interests with considerable address. The Emperor Charles VI, the last Habsburg in the male line and the father of Maria Theresa, was asked by Frederick William to stand sponsor for his eldest son, that son later destined to be such an enemy to the House of Habsburg, as Hannibal was to Rome.
