Whatever disappointments she may have had in life, she lived long enough to see the fulfilment of her patriotic dreams; she wore the Imperial crown of Germany, and she saw in the Crown Prince Frederick the fulfilment of all that a mother can dream of for her son. One wishes that she had died a year sooner, so as to be spared the terrible tragedy of her son’s illness and death in 1888. That son, our _Princeps juventutis_, had been educated by my friend Ernst Curtius, and was on most friendly terms with many of my German friends. I made his acquaintance when he came to Oxford as a very young man in 1857. He brought George Bunsen and two friends with him, and I took rooms for them at the Angel Hotel, which stood where the Examination School, the so-called Chamber of Horrors, now stands. For several days I took the Prince to all the Colleges and to some of the lectures, even to one of the public examinations. No one knew him, and we preserved the strictest _incognito_. He quickly perceived the advantages of the English university system, particularly of the college life and the tutorial teaching. But he saw that it would be hopeless to attempt to introduce that system into Germany. Though at that time everything English was admired in Germany, he was clear-sighted enough to see that it is better to learn than simply to copy. The weak point in the German university system is that, unless an undergraduate is personally known to a professor, he receives very little guidance. He generally arrives from school, where he has been under very strict guidance, without any choice as to what he really wishes to learn. He then suddenly finds himself independent, and free to choose from an immense _menu_ (_Index lectionum_) whatever tempts his appetite. Most German students, when they leave school, have not only a natural curiosity, but a real thirst for learning. They have also a feeling of great reverence for the professors, particularly for the most famous professors in each university. They often select their university in order to hear the lectures of a certain professor, and if he is moved to another university they migrate with him. In the strictly professional faculties of medicine, law, and theology, there is no doubt a certain routine, and students know by a kind of tradition what lectures they should attend in each semester. But in the philosophical faculty there is little, if any, tradition, and looking at my book of lectures, attested by the various professors at Leipzig, I am perfectly amazed at the variety of incongruous subjects on which I attended professorial classes. Unless they were all properly entered and attested in my book I could not believe that at that time (1840–41), when I was only seventeen years of age, I had really attended lectures on so many heterogeneous subjects. In this respect, in preventing waste, the college or tutorial system has, no doubt, many advantages, but the young Prince saw very