Was not hanged; sat prisoner for twenty-seven years after;
overgrown with hair, legs and arms chained together, heavy iron bar
uniting both ankles; diet bread-and-water;--for the rest, healthy;
and died, not very miserable it is said, in 1784. Shocking
traitors, Weingarten and he."

Yes, a diabolical pair, they, sure enough:--and the thing they
betrayed against their Masters, was that a celestial thing?
Servants of the Devil do fall out; and Servants not of the Devil
are fain, sometimes, to raise a quarrel of that kind!--

The then world, as we said, was one loud uproar of logic on the
right reading and the wrong of those Sibylline Documents: "Did your
King of Prussia interpret them aright, or even try it? Did not he
use them as a cloak for highway robbery, and swallowing of a
peaceable Saxony, bad man that he surely is?" For Friedrich's
demeanor, this time again, when it came to the acting point, was of
eminent rapidity; almost a swifter lion-spring than ever; and it
brought on him, in the aerial or vocal way, its usual result:
huge clamor of rage and logic from uninformed mankind.
Clamorous rage and logic, which has now sunk irresuscitably dead;--
nothing of it much worth mentioning to modern readers, scarcely
even its HIC JACET (in Footnotes, for the benefit of the
curious!),--and it is, at last, a thing not doubtful to anybody
that Friedrich, in that matter did read aright. So that now the
loud uproar is reduced to one small question with us, What did he
read in those Menzel Documents? What Fact lying in them was it that
Friedrich had to read? Here, smelted down by repeated roastings, is
succinct answer;--for the ultimate fragment of incombustible here
as elsewhere, will go into a nutshell, once the continents of