SKETCH OF ANDREW DICKSON WHITE. 555 



there given a place upon the Jury of Appeals. In the spring of 

 1879, by appointment of President Hayes, he became American 

 minister to the German Empire, and in that post he remained till 

 1881. 



After his resignation, in 1885, of the presidency of Cornell, he 

 again crossed the Atlantic, and tarried in Europe till the spring 

 of 1887. Returning, with renewed vigor, he had not yet entered 

 on any serious work when the heaviest blow of his life, the un- 

 foreseen and almost instantaneous death of Mrs. White, threw all 

 his plans into confusion. His married life had beein singularly 

 happy, and Mrs. White his almost constant companion. On the 

 expedition to Santo Domingo he had been forced to leave her 

 behind, and after the false rumor of the loss of the commissioners 

 at sea, and the publication of their obituaries in the metropolitan 

 journals, he had come back in safety to find her hair turned to 

 snowy white. Now it was his turn to suffer, and the friends who 

 saw him breaking beneath his grief persuaded him again to go 

 abroad. There he lingered till the late summer of 1889 ; then, 

 returning, he again took up his home in Ithaca, where though 

 he had declined the honorary presidency and the deanship of the 

 School of History, which had in turn been tendered him by the 

 university he was still bound to Cornell by his duties as a 

 trustee. And now, in 1892, there came to preside in his home a 

 second wife. Miss Helen Magill, a daughter of President Magill, 

 of Swarthmore herself well known as scholar and as educator. In 

 1892 he was made, by President Harrison, minister of the United 

 States at St. Petersburg, and, retained in that post by Mr. Cleve- 

 land, spent at the Russian capital the next two years. It was a 

 pleasing visit, after forty years, to the scene of his earliest diplo- 

 matic experiences. His return to this country in 1895, and his 

 appointment in January, 189G, to a place upon the important 

 Commission of Inquiry into the Venezuelan boundary are fresh 

 in the memory of all American readers. 



In this busy life, so filled with the cares of the teacher, the 

 politician, the man of affairs, there has been little leisure for the 

 research that goes to the making of books ; and few of the liter- 

 ary plans with which he began his career have been realized. His 

 biography of Jefferson was never written. Of his long-dreamed- 

 of history of the French Revolution, for which he collected a ma- 

 terial unequaled on this side of the Atlantic, only his admirable 

 little monograph on Paper Money Inflation in France, and his 

 stimulating Bibliography of the Revolution, in the book of Judge 

 Morris, are the visible results. Of his inspiring academic lectures 

 on the general history of modern Europe, but two or three have 

 seen the light as magazine articles ; though their topical outlines, 

 printed for his students and by them scattered abroad, have sug- 



