ONE:On the 18th of December a strong Austrian army entered Silesia and took possession of the country of Glatz. The Prussian troops were withdrawn in good order to their strong fortresses on the Oder. The old Prince Leopold, the cast-iron man, called the Old Dessauer, the most inflexible of mortals, was left in command of the Prussian troops. He was, however, quite seriously alienated from Frederick. A veteran soldier, having spent his lifetime on fields of blood, and having served the monarchs of Prussia when Frederick was but a child, and who had been the military instructor of the young prince, he deemed himself entitled to consideration which an inexperienced officer might not command. In one of the marches to which we have referred, Leopold ventured to take a route different from that which Frederick had prescribed to him. In the following terms the Prussian king reprimanded him for his disobedience:
TWO:Catharine of Russia had a son, Paul, her heir to the throne. It so chanced that she died just at the time Prince Henry of Prussia was visiting St. Petersburg. Through his agency Paul was induced to take as a second wife a niece of Fredericks, the eldest daughter of Eugene of Würtemberg. Thus the ties between Russia and Prussia were still more strengthened, so far as matrimonial alliances could strengthen them. The wedding took place in Berlin on the 18th of October, 1776.The fault-finding character of the king, and his intense devotion to perfecting his army, both increased with his advancing years. After one of his reviews of the troops in Silesia, in the year 1784, he wrote in the following severe strain to the commanding general:
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