Scholars are just now writing learned essays as to whether the idea of the apotheosis of Augustus came to the Romans from Greece or from Egypt, or whether it may be a survival of fetishism. It may have had a much more homely origin, however. To the common people in the villages round Dessau, I feel sure that the Duke was little short of a god, provided always that they knew what was meant by a god. He might not have created the world, even _Divus Augustus_ was not credited with that _tour de force_; but there was nothing else, I believe, that the peasants would have thought beyond the power of their Duke. To us children also, the Duke, the Duchess, and all the members of the Ducal family, were something quite different from the rest of the world, and some of these impressions of childhood often remain for life. When their carriage passed through the streets, everybody stood still, took off his hat, and remained bareheaded till they had passed. There was nothing servile in all this, as little as there is in a Frenchman signing himself _Votre très-obéissant serviteur_, for no one ever thought at that time that it could be otherwise. Nor am I at all certain that this outward respect for a sovereign is a mistake, for in honouring their sovereign, people after all but honour themselves. Whether he is supposed to be a sovereign by the grace of God, or by hereditary right, or by the voice of the people, he represents the country and the people; he is their duke, their king, their emperor, and if they wish to see him honoured by others, they must not fail to honour him themselves. When I saw the other day a king passing through the streets of his own capital, and no one touching his hat, I thought, “What a low opinion these people must have of themselves.” Even as boys at school we felt a pride in our Duke, and, though we knew scraps only of the glorious history of his ancestors, we knew how they had borne the brunt of the battle in all the greatest episodes of the history of Germany.