[History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia Vol. III. (of XXI.) by Thomas Carlyle]@TWC D-Link bookHistory Of Friedrich II. of Prussia Vol. III. (of XXI.) CHAPTER VII 12/12
But in the end, the Law had to be allowed its course; George Friedrich got his own Territories back (all but some surreptitious nibblings in the Jagerndorf quarter, to be noticed elsewhere), and also got Baireuth, his poor Cousin's Inheritance;--sole heir, he now, in Culmbath, the Line of Casimir being out. One owns to a kind of love for poor Albert Alcibiades.
In certain sordid times, even a "Failure of a Fritz" is better than some Successes that are going.
A man of some real nobleness, this Albert; though not with wisdom enough, not with good fortune enough.
Could he have continued to "rule the situation" (as our French friends phrase it); to march the fanatical Papistries, and Kaiser Karl, clear out of it, home to Spain and San Justo a little earlier; to wave the coming Jesuitries away, as with a flaming sword; to forbid beforehand the doleful Thirty-Years War, and the still dolefuler spiritual atrophy (the flaccid Pedantry, ever rummaging and rearranging among learned marine-stores, which thinks itself Wisdom and Insight; the vague maunderings, flutings; indolent, impotent daydreaming and tobacco-smoking, of poor Modern Germany) which has followed therefrom,--ACH GOTT, he might have been a "SUCCESS of a Fritz" three times over! He might have been a German Cromwell; beckoning his People to fly, eagle-like, straight towards the Sun; instead of screwing about it in that sad, uncertain, and far too spiral manner!--But it lay not in him; not in his capabilities or opportunities, after all: and we but waste time in such speculations..
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