The true is well riddled out from amid the false; the important and essential are alone given us, the unimportant and superfluous honestly thrown away.

A lean wiry veracity (an immense advantage in any Literature, good or bad!) is everywhere beneficently observable; the QUALITY of the intellect always extremely good, whatever its quantity may be.
It is true, his spelling--"ASTEURE" for "A CETTE HEURE"-- is very bad.
And as for punctuation, he never could understand the mystery of it; he merely scatters a few commas and dashes, as if they were shaken out of a pepper-box upon his page, and so leaves it.

These are deficiencies lying very bare to criticism; and I confess I never could completely understand them in such a man.

He that would have ordered arrest for the smallest speck of mud on a man's buff-belt, indignant that any pipe-clayed portion of a man should not be perfectly pipeclayed: how could he tolerate false spelling, and commas shaken as out of a pepper-box over his page?
It is probable he cared little about Literature, after all; cared, at least, only about the essentials of it; had practically no ambition for himself, or none considerable, in that kind;--and so might reckon exact obedience and punctuality, in a soldier, more important than good spelling to an amateur literary man: He never minded snuff upon his own chin, not even upon his waistcoat and breeches: A merely superficial thing, not worth bothering about, in the press of real business!-- That Friedrich's Course of Education did on the whole prosper, in spite of every drawback, is known to all men.

He came out of it a man of clear and ever-improving intelligence; equipped with knowledge, true in essentials, if not punctiliously exact, upon all manner of practical and speculative things, to a degree not only unexampled among modern Sovereign Princes so called, but such as to distinguish him even among the studious class.