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pearances are never more deceitful than when Bismarck and Moltke, the two main pillars of the Empire, are seen together. A stranger who had merely read of their respective achievements, without deriving from art some familiarity with their features, would, on first beholding them, infallibly mistake the diplomatist for the soldier. In the tall figure, the broad shoulders; the thick neck; the grisly mustache, the bushy eyebrows, and the grim, determined look of the Prince, he would at once be sure of the victory in three unparalleled campaigns.… And not only has Bismarck the body, but also the spirit of a soldier.… Largely inheriting the instincts of a warrior-ancestry and a military nation. Prince Bismarck is a soldier by nature; a statesman only by chance; and even his statesmanship is of a military order. Above all things, his figure is that of a very powerful fighting man, a William Wallace, or a Wallenstein; and no more perfect idea could be got of a mediæval knight in armor, terrible to foes, than when the Chancellor appears, mounted on a heavy charger, in his shining cuirass and eagle-crested Helm. There is no Prussian officer who does not feel proud of him as a comrade; for taken all around, there is probably no man of finer physique in all the German army. At a Court where the Princes are all tall, and some of the Generals look like giants; there is no one who overtops or outweighs the Honorary Colonel of the Magdeburg Cuirassiers. He stands six feet two in his boots[1]—and, though a septuagenarian, as
- ↑ "On one of the posts of the door of the study at Friedrichsruh, the height of each member of the Chancellor's family was solemnly registered on the last day of 1880 by the Prince himself; and the pencilled inscriptions which are still to be seen there are as follows;
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