“A conqueror's enemies are not all in front of him,” said Wallenstein, and we know Voltaire's apologue about that “grain of sand in the eye which checked Alexander's march.” Bismarck, like other great fighters, has had to shake off friends—real friends—tugging at his arm. He has had to foil boudoir cabals more powerful than Parliamentary majorities. He has got into those little scrapes which Lord Beaconsfield compared to sudden fogs in a park: “You may have the luck to walk straight home through them, or they may cause you to go miles out of your way and to miss anything, from a dinner to an appointment on which all your prospects depend.” Bismarck again has known the worry and agony of being unable to convince persons of thick head or of timorous conscience, whose co-operation was absolutely indispensable to him. Lord Chesterfield well said that the manner of a man's discourse is of more weight than the matter, for there are more people with ears to be charmed than with minds to understand. Bismarck is no charmer; he has had to contend with the disadvantage of cumbersome speech moved by slow thoughts, and of a temper inflammable as touchwood. For many years he was considered by those who knew him best to be more of a trooper than a politician. Lord Ampthill once found him reading Andersen's story on the Ugly Duckling, which relates how a duck hatched a swan's egg, and how the cygnet was jeered at by his putative brethren, the ducklings, until one day a troop of lordly swans, floating down the river, saluted him as one of their race. “Ah,” observed Bismarck, “it was a long time before my poor mother could be persuaded that in hatching me she had not produced a goose.”