However, the guardian of the palace has moved on, the other members of the party are getting bored, and our foreigner follows the guardian’s lead.  Thus conducted, he passes through half a dozen rooms, each a museum of historical associations—­the dining-room with its round table made famous by Menzel’s picture (now in the Berlin National Gallery) in which Frederick and his guests are seen seated, but in which it is difficult if not impossible to be certain which is the host; the concert-room with the clock which Frederick was in the habit of winding up, and which “is said to have stopped at the precise moment of his death, 2.20 a.m., August 17th, 1786”; the death-chamber with its eloquent and pathetic statue, Magnussen’s “Last Moments of Frederick the Great”; the library and picture gallery.  Strangely enough, Baedeker has no mention of a female subject portrayed in the concert-room in all sorts of attitudes and in all sorts and no sort of costume.  Yet every one has heard of La Barberini, the only woman, the chroniclers (and Voltaire among them) assure us, Frederick ever loved.  She was no woman of birth or wit like the Pompadour, Recamier or Stael, but of merely ordinary understanding and the wife of a subordinate official of the Court.  She charmed Frederick, however, and may have loved him.  If so, let us remember that the morals of those days were not those of ours, and not grudge the lonely King his enjoyment of her beauty and amiability.

One thing only remains for our foreigner to see—­the coffin of Frederick in the old Garrison Church.  It lies in a small chamber behind the pulpit and looks more like the strong box of a miser than the last resting-place of a great king.  For such a man it seems poor and mean, but probably Frederick himself did not wish for better.  He must have known that his real monument would be his reputation with posterity.  In fact the chroniclers agree, and the noble statue of Magnussen confirms the impression, that at the close of his stormy life he was glad finally to be at rest anywhere. “Quand je serai la,” he was wont to say, pointing to where his dogs were buried in the palace park, “je serai sans souci.”

In every court there is a disposition on the part of courtiers to agree with everything the monarch says, to flatter him as dexterously as they can, to minister to princely vanity, if vanity there be, to “crawl on their bellies,” in the choice language of hostile court critics, or “wag their tails” and double up their bodies at every bow; show, in short, in different ways, often all unconsciously, the presence of a servile and self-interested mind.  The disposition is not to be found in courts alone.  It is one of the commonest and most malignant qualities of humanity, and can any day and at any hour be observed in action in any Ministry of State, any mercantile office, any great warehouse, any public institution, in every scene, in fact, where one or many men are dependent for their living on the favour or caprice