Poschinger, in his “Conversations with Prince Bismarck,” records the following appreciation by the latter of Lord Beaconsfield during the Berlin Congress: “I frequently had him to spend the evening with us; as he was unwell he only came on the condition of being alone, and I thus had many an opportunity of getting to know him well. I must say that, in spite of his fantastic novel writing, he is a capable statesman, far above Gortchakoff and many others. It was easy to transact business with him; in a quarter of an hour you knew exactly how you stood with him; the limits to which he was prepared to go were clearly defined, and a rapid summary soon precised matters. Beaconsfield speaks magnificent and melodious English, and has a good voice; he spoke nothing but English at the Congress. The Crown Princess asked me about this time whether Beaconsfield did not speak French very beautifully. I answered that I had not heard anything of it up till then. ‘But in the Congress?’ she inquired further. ‘He only speaks English,’ said I; ‘and here she dropped the conversation,’ added the Chancellor in English, with a significant gesture of his hand.”[38] As regards what Bismarck called his “fantastic novel writing,” there may be a word to be said. Perhaps of all his writings the one to which the epithet “fantastic” might the most righteously be applied was “Lothair,” and yet even in that book, of which superficial readers spoke with some contempt, persons of more penetrating philosophical and political judgment perceived depths which were unsuspected by the vulgar herd of circulating-library subscribers. Lord Russell, for instance—no friend to the author—expressed his amazement that people should fail to see what deep significance underlay the gaudy trappings. In his view it was the book of a political seer; and he was right. Did it not forewarn us of the dangers of the Commune? The fiction of the novel-writer was in his hands a vehicle for impressing the truths of the politician as they appeared to him. “Born in a library,” as he said of himself, he had amassed a rich store of out-of-the-way book-lore, and would often puzzle the reporters with some quotation that was quite new to them. I remember a speech to the point (not that Horace could be called an out-of-the-way book), in which he said that if anybody should disagree with him “naviget Anticyras.”[39] This plunged the newspapers into the blackest of fogs. I met him the next day and we laughed a good deal over their bewilderment and their struggles to get out of the gloom. “Let this be a lesson to you, my dear boy, never to use a quotation with which the reporters are not familiar.”