382 Appendix I 



the old King had as yet refused to play a part. I remember a visit paid 

 to Frankfort by the Crown Prince of Prussia, afterwards Emperor Wil- 

 liam I, and his accession a little later to the Prussian throne, which set 

 Bismarck securely in the saddle and began that intrigue which resulted in 

 the war with Denmark over Sleswig Holstein, as to which Usedom was 

 daily eloquent. 



I have dreamlike memories, too, of many hours — some pleasant, some 

 wearisome — spent in attendance on the Princes and Princesses of the 

 Royal and Electoral Houses to whom we at the English Legation were 

 accredited, including Princess Alice of Hesse Darmstadt, our Queen Vic- 

 toria's daughter, and a vast number of cousinly allied royalties assembled 

 one summer at the family chateau of Rumpenheim, where I had the priv- 

 ilege of paying an early court to our future Queen Alexandra while she 

 was still a girl of seventeen, and her sister, afterwards Empress of Russia, 

 pretty but plainly dressed maidens of no acknowledged importance, though 

 we at the Legation had been secretly apprised of the intended marriage 

 of the elder with our Prince of Wales. 



All these incidents were unconscious elements in my diplomatic educa- 

 tion. My thoughts, however, at the time ran more on poetry than politics, 

 and what interest I took in German thought lay rather in the direction 

 of science which was beginning to perplex me, for Darwin's "Origin of 

 Species" had only just been published. 



My second appointment in Frankfort found the Bismarckian policy in 

 full swing. After three years' absence at other posts — Madrid, Paris, 

 and Lisbon — I had returned in 1866 in time to witness the great duel in 

 the Diet between Prussia and Austria shortly after to be decided at Sa- 

 dowa, which displayed Bismarck as the leading force of his generation. 



Of the great man himself I have but a single personal recollection, that 

 of a couple of hours spent in his society at tea alone with Lady Malet. 

 He was then still an object of dislike and even ridicule at Frankfort, but 

 already recognized by Lady Malet, a very clever woman, to whom he had 

 paid a certain court while at the Frankfort Legation, and who already 

 saw in him the man of genius he was soon to show himself. My memory 

 of him is of a tall, distinguished personage, still slight in figure, who, hav- 

 ing been told about me by our hostess favourably as having some faculty 

 of verse, talked pleasantly and well on literature and science in excellent 

 English for a couple of hours, affecting a certain Anglomania, where he 

 touched on politics. He showed himself thus at his best, and left me 

 with a feeling of the heroic such as a young man gives to one already 

 beginning to be famous and who had been kind to him. 



All this, however, had failed to give me when I left Frankfort after 

 Sadowa any enthusiasm for Germany, and when the war of 1870 broke 

 out I was strongly anti-Prussian. My connection with the Paris Embassy 

 in the days of the Napoleonic glory had made me a partisan of France, 

 and I had come to look upon Germany as intellectually the home of bar- 

 barism given up to the grosser forms of social life and clumsy in its poli- 

 tics as in all else. 



With these few words I leave my diary to tell its own story. 



