This was one of the successfulest strokes of business ever done by Friedrich Wilhelm; who had been forced, by sheer compulsion, to embark in that big game.--"Royal Prussia," the Western or POLISH Prussia: this too, as all Newspapers know, has, in our times, gone the same road as the other.

Which probably, after all, it may have had, in Nature, some tendency to do?
Cut away, for reasons, by the Polish sword, in that Battle of Tannenberg, long since; and then, also for reasons, cut back again! That is the fact;--not unexampled in human History.
Old Johann Casimir, not long after that Peace of Oliva, getting tired of his unruly Polish chivalry and their ways, abdicated;--retired to Paris; and "lived much with Ninon de l'Enclos and her circle," for the rest of his life.

He used to complain of his Polish chivalry, that there was no solidity in them; nothing but outside glitter, with tumult and anarchic noise; fatal want of one essential talent, the talent of Obeying; and has been heard to prophesy that a glorious Republic, persisting in such courses, would arrive at results which would surprise it.
Onward from this time, Friedrich Wilhelm figures in the world; public men watching his procedure; Kings anxious to secure him,--Dutch printsellers sticking up his Portraits for a hero-worshipping Public.
Fighting hero, had the Public known it, was not his essential character, though he had to fight a great deal.

He was essentially an Industrial man; great in organizing, regulating, in constraining chaotic heaps to become cosmic for him.

He drains bogs, settles colonies in the waste-places of his Dominions, cuts canals; unweariedly encourages trade and work.