"MY DEAREST SISTER,--The French have just laid hold of Friesland; are about to pass the Weser; they have instigated the Swedes to declare war against me; the Swedes are sending 17,000 men into Pommern; will be burthensome to Stralsund and the poor country-people mainly, having no captain over them but a hydra-headed National Palaver at home, and a Long-pole with cocked hat on it here at hand. The Russians have besieged Memel; Lehwald has them on his front and in his rear. The troops of the Reich, from your plain of Furth yonder, are also about to emerge. All this will force me to evacuate Bohemia so soon as that crowd of enemies gets into motion. I am firmly resolved on the extremest efforts to save my country. We shall see if Fortune will take a new thought, or if she will entirely turn her back upon me. Happy the moment when I took to training myself in philosophy! There is nothing else that can sustain the soul in a situation like mine. I spread out to you, dear sister, the detail of my sorrows; if these things regarded myself only I could stand it with composure; but I am bound guardian of the safety and happiness of a people which has been put under my charge. There lies the sting of it, and I shall have to reproach myself with every fault, if, by any delay or over-haste, I occasion the smallest accident; all the more as, at present, any fault may be capital.
"What a business! Here is the liberty of Germany, and that Protestant cause for which so much blood has been shed; here are those two great interests again at stake, and the pinch of this huge game is such that an entirely unlucky quarter of an hour may establish over Germany the tyrannous dominion of the House of Austria for ever! I am in the case of a traveller who sees himself surrounded and ready to be assassinated by a troop of cut-throats who intend to share his spoils. Since the League of Cambria, there is no example of such a conspiracy as that infamous triumvirate now forms against me. Was it ever seen before that three great princes laid plot in concert to destroy a fourth, who had done nothing against them? I have not had the least quarrel either with France or with Russia, still less with Sweden. If, in common life, three citizens took it into their heads to fall upon their neighbour and burn his house about him, they very certainly, by sentence of tribunal, would be broken on the wheel. What! and will sovereigns, who maintain these tribunals and these laws in their States, give such example to their subjects? Happy, my dear sister, is the obscure man whose good sense, from youth upwards, has renounced all sorts of glory; who, in his safe, low place, has none to envy him, and whose fortune does not excite the cupidity of scoundrels!