Leaving the room where Geheimrath Hepke works, and proceeding to the right along the adjoining narrow passage, we reach the small room containing the reference library of the Ministry. Here at a window which opens on the court another Privy Councillor of Embassy, Count Hatzfeldt, (afterwards promoted to the position of Minister in Madrid, then representative of the Empire at the Porte, and in 1880 appointed Secretary of State under the Imperial Chancellor,) spends a few hours daily. In the next room we hear the scratching of the ever ready pen of his older colleague, Abeken, whose gifts and character must now be dealt with. While the Chancellor himself selected Lothar Bucher as his fellow worker, Abeken came to him by inheritance. Heinrich Abeken may be regarded in almost every respect as the type of the official of the old school. His whole being and inclinations belong to that epoch in our history which may be described as the literary-æsthetic era, a time when political affairs were of secondary interest to poetry, philosophy, philology treated from an artistic standpoint, and other scientific questions. He enjoyed himself most, and felt himself most at home, in a circle of ideas which, previous to the appearance of Bismarck, chiefly attracted the attention of the Court, the upper classes, the higher bourgeoisie and persons of education. Indeed, he has hardly ever for a single moment thoroughly thrown himself into politics. Even at times when the welfare of his country appeared to be at stake he seemed to be more interested in some æsthetic question than in measures more closely connected with the sphere to which his office assigned him. It happened not infrequently that while others were anxiously awaiting the outcome of a political crisis his thoughts were occupied by an entirely different subject, so that for instance the verses of some old or new poet kept running through his head, and were usually recited by him with much pathos, although they had no visible connection with the situation of the moment. Abeken, who hailed from Osnabrück, was born in 1809. His education was conducted by his uncle Bernhard Rudolf Abeken, the philologist and writer on æsthetics, who lived at Weimar in Schiller’s time, and who had assimilated the style of sentiment which then prevailed there. The nephew afterwards studied theology, and in 1834 held the position of Chaplain to the Prussian Embassy in Rome under Josias Bunsen. He there married an Englishwoman, who was taken from him by death a few months later. A friend of Bunsen, whom he followed to London on his transfer to that post in 1841, and whose views and aspirations in ecclesiastical matters he shared, Abeken even at that time devoted himself so far to diplomacy that he drew up a memorandum on the creation of an evangelical bishopric in Jerusalem. This idea was regarded with lively sympathy in the most exalted quarters in Berlin, although, later on, under William I., it would