Anecdotes, false Criticisms, hungry French Memoirs, which will
confirm him in that impossible idea. Had such proved, on survey,
to be the character of Friedrich, there is one British Writer
whose curiosity concerning him would pretty soon have died away;
nor could any amount of unwise desire to satisfy that feeling in
fellow-creatures less seriously disposed have sustained him alive,
in those baleful Historic Acherons and Stygian Fens, where he has
had to dig and to fish so long, far away from the upper light!--
Let me request all readers to blow that sorry chaff entirely out
of their minds; and to believe nothing on the subject except what
they get some evidence for.

SECOND English source relates to the Private Character.
Friedrich's Biography or Private Character, the English, like
the French, have gathered chiefly from a scandalous libel by
Voltaire, which used to be called Vie Privee du Roi de
Prusse (Private Life of the King of Prussia) [First
printed, from a stolen copy, at Geneva, 1784; first proved to be
Voltaire's (which some of his admirers had striven to doubt),
Paris, 1788; stands avowed ever since, in all the Editions of his
Works (ii. 9-113 of the Edition by Bandouin Freres, 97 vols.,
Paris, 1825-1834), under the title Memoires pour servir a
Vie de M. de Voltaire, --with patches of repetition in
the thing called (italic) Commentaire Historique,
which follows ibid. at great length.] libel undoubtedly written by
Voltaire, in a kind of fury; but not intended to be published by
him; nay burnt and annihilated, as he afterwards imagined; No line
of which, that cannot be otherwise proved, has a right to be
believed; and large portions of which can be proved to be wild
exaggerations and perversions, or even downright lies,--written in