History of Friedrich II of Prussia, vol 7 | Page 8

machinery does not seem to have done much, if anything; and Hotham, who with the English Court had calculated on it (on their detection of it) as the grand means of blowing Grumkow out of the field, produced a far opposite result on trying, as we shall see! That was a bit of heavy ordnance which disappointed everybody. Seized by the enemy before it could do any mischief; enemy turned it round on the inventor; fired it off on the inventor, and--it exploded through the touch-hole; singeing some people's whiskers: nothing more!--
A PEEP INTO THE NOSTI-GRUMKOW CORRESPONDENCE CAUGHT UP IN ST. MARY AXE.
Would the reader wish to look into this Nosti-Grumkow Correspondence at all? I advise him, not. Good part of it still lies in the Paper-Office here; [Prussian Despatches, vols. xl. xli.: in a fragmentary state; so much of it as they had caught up, and tried to make use of;--far too much.] likely to be published by the Prussian Dryasdust in coming time: but a more sordid mass of eavesdroppings, kitchen-ashes and floor-sweepings, collected and interchanged by a pair of treacherous Flunkies (big bullying Flunky and little trembling cringing one, Grumkow and Reichenbach), was never got together out of a gentleman's household. To no idlest reader, armed even with barnacles, and holding mouth and nose, can the stirring-up of such a dust-bin be long tolerable. But the amazing problem was this Editor's, doomed to spell the Event into clearness if he could, and put dates, physiognomy and outline to it, by help of such Flunky-Sanscrit!-- That Nosti-Grumkow Correspondence, as we now have it in the Paper-Office,--interpretable only by acres of British Despatches, by incondite dateless helpless Prussian Books ("printed Blotches of Human Stupor," as Smelfungus calls them): how gladly would one return them all to St. Mary Axe, there to lie through Eternity! It is like holding dialogue with a rookery; asking your way (perhaps in flight for life, as was partly my own case) by colloquy with successive or even simultaneous Rookeries. Reader, have you tried such a thing? An adventure, never to be spoken of again, when once DONE!
Wilhelmina pretends to give quotations [Wilhelmina, i. 233-235.] from this subterranean Grumkow-Reichenbach Correspondence; but hers are only extracts from some description or remembrance; hardly one word is close to the original, though here and there some outline or shadow of a real passage is traceable. What fractional elements, capable of gaining some vestige of meaning when laid together in their cosmic order, I could pick from the circumambient immensity not cosmic, are here for the reader's behoof. Let him skip, if, like myself, he is weary; for the substance of the story is elsewhere given. Or perhaps he has the curiosity to know the speech of birds? With abridgment, by occasional change of phrase, above all by immense omission,--here, in specimen, is something like what the Rookery says to poor Friedrich Wilhelm and us, through St. Mary Axe and the Copyists in the Foreign Office! Friedrich Wilhelm reads it (Hotham gives him reading of it) some weeks hence; we not till generations afterwards. I abridge to the utmost;--will mark in single commas what is not Abridgment but exact Translation;--with rigorous attention to dates, and my best fidelity to any meaning there may be:--
TO NOSTI (the so-called Excellenz Reichenbach) IN LONDON:
Gumkow from Berlin LOQUITUR, Reichenbach listening with both his ears (words caught up in St. Mary Axe).
BERLIN, 3d MARCH, 1730. "The time has now come when Reichenbach must play his game. Let him write that the heads of the Opposition, who play Austria as a card in Parliament, 'are in consternation, Walpole having hinted to them that he was about to make friends with the King of Prussia;' 'that by means of certain ministers at Berlin, and by other subterranean channels (AUTRES SOUTERRAINS), his Prussian Majesty had been brought to a disposition of that kind' [Knyphausen, Borck and others will be much obliged to Reichenbach for so writing!], That Reichenbach knows they intend sending a Minister to Berlin; but is certain enough, as perhaps they are, his Prussian Majesty will not let himself be lured or caught in the trap: but that the very rumor of its being possible for him to change" from Austria, "would be an infinite gain to the English Ministry,"--salvation of them, in fact, in the Parliamentary cockpit. "That they had already given out in the way of rumor, How sure they were of the Court of Berlin whenever it came to the point. That Reichenbach had tried to learn from 73 [An Indecipherable.] what the real result from Berlin was; and did not think it much, though the Walpole people," all hanging so perilously upon Prussia for their existence, 'affected a great gayety; and indeed felt what a gain it was even to have