as well as all sense of fear, had not been destroyed by swaying, not merely to and fro, as frequently happens, but in three different directions, which is of rarer occurrence. I am very anxious that you should come here, if only for a few days, in order to discuss matters.... Do, please, write soon, and criticise this my letter. Write also, if it can possibly be managed, that you are coming.... I yearn for political death. A man who has grown old and blunt and peevish is no longer the right man to wriggle his way through between such a singular master (for whom, all the same, I have an affection of forty years’ standing) and such a premier. Indeed, my bodily conformation is a symbolic warning against doing anything of the kind.”[15] Seventh Envelope. Documents of the period extending from the 7th of November, 1858, to the 21st of June, 1861, chiefly letters from Minister Schleinitz to Bismarck, and from the latter to the former from St. Petersburg, including a very long one of the 12th of May, 1859, in which B. deals with the improvement of Prussia’s position in Germany as opposed to Austria, indicating ways and means of bringing it about.... Then a very interesting communication, dated the 14th of May, from Bismarck to Alvensleben, which was accompanied by a copy of the letter of the 12th. According to this, the latter was really intended for the then Minister President, the Prince of Hohenzollern, yet the writer is “in the end in a state of doubt as to how his Highness is in his heart likely to regard this matter.” The letter to Alvensleben then goes on to say: “I believe too that Schleinitz will not withhold my letter from H.R.H. the Regent, although I scarcely hope that it will be received with favour there. If you are so disposed and have an opportunity of kindling in the Prince a spark of royal ambition in this sense, I beg of you to make use of the contents of the enclosure, as if I had written to you privately on the same subjects upon which I wrote to Schleinitz. Of course, the only difference is in the head and tail of it, and to whether in your case the title of Excellency already connotes externally the excellences of the inward man. There is almost always an element of mistrust and discontent when I write to Schleinitz, sending you at the same time a copy of my letter, and the Prince allows it to leak out.” On the 29th of May, 1859, Bismarck gives his Minister a serio-comic description of the petty proceedings of the envoys of the German Middle States at St. Petersburg, with whom Gortschakoff has little intercourse, and who worry the more fortunate Prussian representative in their efforts to obtain some material to satisfy their love of gossip. The Hanoverian, Münster, is particularly active and importunate. The Saxon, Könneritz, manifests the warmest enthusiasm for Prussia, abuses Beust and Austria, and “speaks as if he were serving under a Carlowitz Ministry; but we have an old