242	Frederick the Great.
The formation of the Fiirstenbund fittingly closes
Frederick's life, and rounds off his career. His was not
the fate which has sometimes befallen great men of being-
cut off by untimely death in the midst of his labours. He
died full of years and with his work accomplished. He
had found Prussia the weakest and by far the smallest
of the great European powers, and he left her their
acknowledged equal in strength and reputation. He
had broken the Austrian supremacy in Germany, and
taught the German nation to look up to Prussia as its
natural leader, while his latest political action provided
machinery by which, if his immediate successors had
inherited his capacity, the time when the leadership was
obtained might have been anticipated by a considerable
period. It is strange but characteristic that it was only
from Austria that he apprehended danger to his own
country or to Germany. He could not conceive a situa-
tion entirely different from that with which he was
acquainted. Events were rapidly approaching by which
the whole social and political condition of Europe was
altered. Yet, though signs of it were everywhere to be
seen, the old king, with all his shrewdness, had no pre-
sentiment of the coming change. Perhaps the very
clearness with which he perceived everything within the
visible horizon prevented his guessing at what lay beyond
it. Anyhow, it is remarkable that though he lived up to
its very verge, he died without the faintest suspicion that
the French Revolution was at hand.