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up enough of philanthropic sentiment to pass for a CHAP. free thinker with ideas of liberalism and humanity. Stately in his appearance, a student of gestures and attitudes before the glass, he was profuse of bows and compliments, and affectedly polite. The color of his eye was a most beautiful blue, and its expression friendly and winning. He himself and those about him professed the strongest sense of the omnipotence of legitimate princes; he loved to rule, and required obedience; his wish was a command. Indif ferent to his English wife, he was excessively sensual; keeping a succession of mistresses from the second year of his marriage to his death. He had courage, and just too much ability to be called insignificant; it was his pride to do his day's work properly; and he introduced economy into the public administration. Devoted to pleasure, yet indefatigable in labor, neither prodigal, nor despotic, nor ambitious, his great defect was that he had no heart, so that he was not capable of gratitude or love, nor true to his word, nor fixed in his principles, nor gifted with insight into character, nor possessed of discernment of military worth. He was a good secondary officer, priggishly exact in the mechanism of a regiment, but wholly unfit to plan a campaign or lead an army.

On the evening of Faucitt's arrival, he sought a conference with the hereditary prince, to whom he bore from the king a special letter. Ferdinand gave unreservedly his most cordial approbation to the British proposal, and promised his interposition with his father in its favor. The reigning duke, although he regretted to part with troops which were the only amusement of his old age, in the distressed state of

CHAP. his finances, gave his concurrence with all imaginable

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facility.

rance,

It now remained for Faucitt to chaffer with Ferthe Brunswick minister, on the price of the troops, which were to be ready early in the spring, to the number of four thousand infantry and three hundred light dragoons. These last were not wanted, but Faucitt accepted them, "rather than appear difficult." Sixty German dollars for each man was demanded as levy money; but thirty crowns banco, or about thirty four and a half of our dollars, was agreed upon. Every soldier who should be killed, was to be paid for at the rate of the levy money; and three wounded were to be reckoned as one killed. The date of the English pay was the next subject in dispute: Brunswick demanded that it should begin three months before the march of the troops, but acquiesced in the advance of two months pay. On the question of the annual subsidy a wrangling was kept up for two days; when it was settled at sixty four thousand five hundred German crowns from the date of the signature of the treaty, and twice that sum for two years after the return of the troops to their own country.

Von Riedesel, a colonel in the duke's service, was selected for the command, and received the rank of a major general. He was a man of uprightness, honor, and activity, enterprising, and full of resources; fond of his profession, of which he had spared no pains to make himself master.

During the war, Brunswick furnished altogether five thousand seven hundred and twenty three mercenaries; a number equal to more than one sixth of the

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able-bodied men in the principality. As a conse- CHAP. quence, two of the battalions destined for the British service were a regular force; the rest, in disregard of promises, were eked out by undisciplined levies, old men, raw boys, and recruits kidnapped out of remote countries.

It is just to inquire if conduct like that of Ferdinand was followed by a happy life and an honorable death. His oldest son died two years before him; his two other sons were idiotic and blind; his oldest daughter was married to the brutal prince of Würtemberg, and perished in 1788. The same intimate relations, which led George the Third to begin the purchase of mercenary troops with his brother-in-law, made him select Ferdinand's younger daughter Caroline, a woman brought up in the lewd atmosphere of her father's palace, accustomed to the company of his mistresses, and environed by licentiousness from her childhood, to become, at the ripe age of twenty seven, the wife of the prince of Wales, and eventually a queen of Great Britain. As to the prince himself, in a battle where his incompetence as a commander assisted to bring upon Prussia a most disastrous defeat, his eyes were shot away; a fugitive, deserted by mistress and friends, he refused to take food, and so died.

From Brunswick Faucitt hurried to Cassel, where his coming was expected by one who knew well the strait to which the British ministry was reduced. The town rises beautifully at the foot of a well wooded hill and overlooks a fertile plain. The people of Hesse preserve the hardy and warlike character of its ancestral tribe, which the Romans could never van

CHAP. quish. It was still a nation of soldiers, whose valor LVII. had been proved in all the battlefields of Europe.

In the former century the republic of Venice had employed them against the Turks, and they had taken part in the siege of Athens.

The landgrave, Frederick the Second, was at that time about fifty six, and had ruled for nearly sixteen years. He had been carefully educated; but his na-. ture was coarse and brutish and obstinate. The wife of his youth, a daughter of George the Second, was the mildest and gentlest of her race; yet she was forced to fly from his inhumanity to his own father for protection. At the age of fifty three he married again, but lived with his second consort on no better terms than with his first.

The landgrave had been scrupulously educated in the reformed church, of which the house of Hesse had ever proudly regarded itself as a bulwark; but he piqued himself on having disburdened his mind of the prejudices of the vulgar; sought to win Voltaire's esteem by doubting various narratives in the Bible; and scoffed alike at the Old Testament and the New. In his view, Calvinism had died out even in Geneva; and Luther, though commendable for having loved wine and women, was but an ordinary man; he therefore turned Catholic in 1749, from dislike to the plebeian simplicity of the established worship of his people. He had learnt to favor toleration, to abolish the use of torture, and to make capital punishments exceedingly rare; at the same time he was the coarse representative of the worst licentiousness of his age; fond of splendor and luxurious living; parading his vices publicly, with shameless indecorum. Having

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no nationality, he sought to introduce French modes CHAP. of life; had his opera, ballet-dancers, masquerades during the carnival, his French playhouse, a cast-off French coquette for his principal mistress, a French superintendent of theatres for his librarian. But nothing could be less like France than his court; life in Cassel was spiritless; "nobody here reads," said Forster; "the different ranks are stiffly separated," said the historian, Von Müller. Birth or wealth alone had influence: merit could not command respect, nor talent hope for fostering care.

To this man Faucitt delivered a letter from the British king. General Schlieffen, the minister with whom he was to conduct the negotiation, prepared him for unconditional acquiescence in every demand, by dwelling on the hazard of finding the landgrave in an unfavorable turn of mind, and describing him "as most exceedingly whimsical and uncertain in his humors and disposition;" at the same time he undertook to promise twelve thousand foot soldiers for service in America.

The prince, who would not confess even to his own mind that he sold his subjects from avarice, professed a strong desire to force the rebels back to their duty, and grew so warm and so sanguine that he seemed inclined, in the cause of monarchy, to head his troops in person. This zeal augured immoderate demands: his first extortion was a sum of more than forty thousand pounds for hospital disbursements during the last war. The demand was scandalous; the account had been liquidated, paid, and closed; but the distress of the government compelled a reconsideration of the claim, and the tribute was enforced.