emperor puts out the eyes of his prisoners he goes on with unabated interest to tell the rest of his story. In accordance with this easy amenity, made up, in unequal parts, of generosity, indifference, and calculation, he assigns a qualified credit to writers seldom treated seriously, such as Damberger and Sugenheim ; so that he was sometimes accused of favouring the Jesuit and sometimes the Jew ; and when Gfrörer assailed him in the tone of Landor or Carlyle he continued to cite him with respect. His extreme discretion and reserve, the absence of fixtures and of edge, made him fortunate in the limits of his work. He laid down his pen between the pacification of Venice and the third crusade, before the Sicilian marriage which wrecked the empire. If it had come down to the struggle for life or death which destroyed the house of Hohenstaufen and broke up the nation, his studious neutrality would have suffered a painful trial.
His eminent qualities, moral and intellectual, obtained an extended acceptance not given to harder men like Waitz and Dümmler, whom scholars prefer and few but scholars read. Outside of his domain, beyond the two centuries which were essentially his own, he was an excellent teacher and adviser. Every office of literary trust was forced upon him, and the inevitable correspondence explains the prodigious fact that only six months ago he was patiently labouring at a book begun before the middle of the century. He had been one of Ranke's earliest pupils, and remained one of the most faithful and representative observers of the direction which his master gave. He did not entirely escape that habit of the seminary of Berlin to dwell so long on the literary preliminaries that, as in the instance of his friend Koepke, the analysis of writers almost precluded touch with events. But, like his teacher, he wrote not for the school but the nation. Like him he believed that the true knot lay in the mingled fortunes of the Teuton and the Latin, of the race whose portion was the empire and the race that held the priesthood. And it was in the same
