Marlborough knew well the worth of these Prussian troops, and also how to stroke his Majesty into continuing them in the field.
He was an expensive King, surrounded by cabals, by Wartenbergs male and female, by whirlpools of intrigues, which, now that the game is over, become very forgettable.

But one finds he was a strictly honorable man; with a certain height and generosity of mind, capable of other nobleness than the upholstery kind.

He had what we may call a hard life of it; did and suffered a good deal in his day and generation, not at all in a dishonest or unmanful manner.

In fact, he is quite recognizably a Hohenzollern,--with his back half broken.

Readers recollect that sad accident: how the Nurse, in one of those headlong journeys which his Father and Mother were always making, let the poor child fall or jerk backward; and spoiled him much, and indeed was thought to have killed him, by that piece of inattention.