History of Friedrich II of Prussia — Appendix   By: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

FREDERICK THE GREAT

By Thomas Carlyle

APPENDIX.

This Piece, it would seem, was translated sixteen years ago; some four or five years before any part of the present HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH got to paper. The intercalated bits of Commentary were, as is evident, all or mostly written at the same time: these also, though they are now become, in parts, SUPERFLUOUS to a reader that has been diligent, I have not thought of changing, where not compelled. Here and there, especially in the Introductory Part, some slight additions have crept in; which the above kind of reader will possibly enough detect; and may even have, for friendly reasons, some vestige of interest in assigning to their new date and comparing with the old. (NOTE OF 1868.)

A DAY WITH FRIEDRICH. (23d July, 1779.)

"OBERAMTMANN (Head Manager) Fromme" was a sister's son of Poet, Gleim, Gleim Canon of Halberstadt, who wrote Prussian "grenadier songs" in, or in reference to, the Seven Years War, songs still printed, but worth little; who begged once, after Friedrich's death, an OLD HAT of his, and took it with him to Halberstadt (where I hope it still is); who had a "Temple of Honor," or little Garden house so named, with Portraits of his Friends hung in it; who put Jean Paul VERY SOON there, with a great explosion of praises; and who, in short, seems to have been a very good effervescent creature, at last rather wealthy too, and able to effervesce with some comfort; Oberamtmann Fromme, I say, was this Gleim's Nephew; and stood as a kind of Royal Land Bailiff under Frederick the Great, in a tract of country called the RHYN LUCH (a dreadfully moory country of sands and quagmires, all green and fertile now, some twenty or thirty miles northwest of Berlin); busy there in 1779, and had been for some years past. He had originally been an Officer of the Artillery; but obtained his discharge in 1769, and got, before long, into this employment. A man of excellent disposition and temper; with a solid and heavy stroke of work in him, whatever he might be set to; and who in this OBERAMTMANNSHIP "became highly esteemed." He died in 1798; and has left sons (now perhaps grandsons or great grandsons), who continue estimable in like situations under the Prussian Government.