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Updated: June 25, 2025
As for the sublime four years' deliberations and debates of this Sanhedrim of the Universe, eloquent debates, conducted, we may say, under such extent of WIG as was never seen before or since, they have fallen wholly to the domain of Dryasdust; and amount, for mankind at this time, to zero PLUS the Burning of Huss.
"Never again will that War, with its deliriums, mad outlays of blood, treasure, and of hope and terror, and far-spread human destruction, rise into visual life in any imagination of living man. In vain shall Dryasdust strive: things mad, chaotic and without ascertainable purpose or result, cannot be fixed into human memories.
There are many Histories about him, too, but they are not comfortable to read. He also has wanted a sacred Poet, and found only a bewildering Dryasdust. His two grand Feats that dwell in the Prussian memory are perhaps none of his greatest, but were of a kind to strike the imagination. They both relate to what was the central problem of his life the recovery of Pommern from the Swedes.
"Prussian Dryasdust," he says elsewhere, "does make a terrible job of it; especially when he attempts to weep through his pipe-clay, or rise with his long ears into the moral sublime. As to the German People, I find that they dimly have not wanted sensibility to Friedrich; that their multitudes of Anecdotes, still circulating among them in print and VIVA VOCE, are proof of this.
But Dryasdust is adeo negligibile ut negligibilius nihil esse possit, and the book is a great one from beginning to end. As for Richard, no doubt, he is not the Richard of history, but what does that matter? He is a most admirable re-creation, softened and refined, of the Richard of a romance which, be it remembered, is itself in all probability as old as the thirteenth century.
What deserts of dust he wrought in, and what a jungle of false growths he had to clear away, Dryasdust and Smelfungus mournfully hint and indignantly moralize, under such significant names does this new Rhadamanthus reveal the real sins of mankind, and deliver them over to the judgment of their peers. Frederick, indeed, is among them, but not of them.
Let the Teutsch Order come to Preussen; head a Crusade there. Hermann, a man of sagacious clear head, listens attentively. Year 1225, thinks Dryasdust, after a struggle. In the name of Heaven, we may still say in a true sense; as they, every Ritter of them to the heart, felt it to be in all manner of senses.
And yet who ever worked harder than he? what plodding chronicler, what prosaic Dryasdust ever went through a greater amount of drudgery than he? His very industry had the intense and impassioned character which belonged to his whole temperament and organization. He toiled with a fiery earnestness and a concentration of purpose which burned into the very heart of the subject he was investigating.
By this means, whether he would or not, he became gradually the author of a great "serial" work, in a frightful number of volumes, on as dry a department of literature as the children of the great desert could have suggested. Nobody, he must have felt, was ever likely to study this great work of his, not even Dr. Dryasdust. He had written in vain, which is not pleasant to know.
No end of troubles to Sigismund, and to Brandenburg through him, from this sublime Hungarian legacy! Like a remote fabulous golden-fleece, which you have to go and conquer first, and which is worth little when conquered. He pawned Brandenburg to Cousin Jobst of Mahren; got "20,000 Bohemian gulden," I guess, a most slender sum, if Dryasdust would but interpret it.
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