It may at once be granted that in conduct Frederick was transformed. Before his disgrace he had been a trifler, after it he worked hard till the day of his death. What is doubtful is that this result could not have been obtained at a less cost. There is no evidence that the King had ever tried the normal method of giving his son a fitting task and a reasonable independence in performing it. Frederick, moreover, was nearing the age at which many triflers develop a new spirit. During his year of exile his health improved. He became stouter in body and firmer in gait, so that at first even Wilhelmina did not recognise him. This change at least was not designed by the father who wished him dead, yet to this may be ascribed much of his novel energy.
It is still less certain that his character had gained from the second education. Many of the striking traits of old reappear. Frederick is still before all else brilliant—a gay and versatile young man with elastic spirits and a passion for music, society, and intellectual conversation. Despite his father’s hatred of all things French, Frederick still looked on Paris as the Mecca of civilisation. His literary ambitions were more pronounced than ever. At Cüstrin he had gone back to verses—verses always Gallic, copious, and bad. A Prussian patriot lamented that while he knew not whether his ancestors had won Magdeburg at cards or in some other way, he had Aristotle’s rules of composition by heart. Yet, for all his perseverance, Lord Mahon speaks with justice of “his two kinds of prose, the rhymed and unrhymed.” In the darkest hours of his struggle against all Europe, he sat down to rhyme in French. “He does not really know the Germans at all,” complained his tutors. Though sometimes brutal, he prided himself on his ceremonious politeness—a German version of Louis XIV. All through his career he was wont at times to put on the great monarch. “Hush, gentlemen,” once exclaimed Voltaire when his royal host thus suddenly stiffened, “the King of Prussia has just come in.” His morals were no better after confronting death than before. “The flesh is weak,” he writes to his mother, “but I do not believe that Cato was Cato when he was young.” It was said that the motive of his amours was vainglory rather than the satisfaction of vicious desires. No one, wrote harsh critics, could rely upon his word, and few if any could tell of a disinterested act that he had done.