interview which had determined him to call the bold cavalier of the Mark to his side. The dreamer’s vague and scheming mind revolved vast projects of Pan-Latin, Pan-German, Pan-Sclavonian combinations, uniting the three great races and the three great churches, with their respective centres at Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, in a triple alliance of universal monarchies, to dominate the world, to inaugurate a new era, to bring on the millennium of civilization, and to place the name of Louis Napoleon at least on a par with those of Moses, Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Constantine, and Charlemagne. We have read in the autobiography of some German philosopher that in his youth he was ravished with ecstasy in thinking of “_the wheels of the eternal essences_”! The visionary projects of this unfortunate imperial seer remind us forcibly of this boyish philosopher. While he was letting France drift on towards the _Où allons nous?_ of Mgr. Dupanloup, he was driving his imaginary chariot, on the “wheels of the eternal essences,” through airy regions, casting an occasional undecided glance on Belgium and the frontiers of the Rhine. Bismarck was not long in taking his measure, and it appears that Prince Gortchakoff had long since learned the passes by which he could magnetize him at pleasure. With his own peculiar, knavish frankness, Bismarck avowed his own objective aim—the rectification of the Prussian frontiers—and found it easy to amuse the decaying emperor with vague hints of compensation to France by allowing the annexation of Belgium and the territory on the left bank of the Rhine. As for the opinion which was formed respecting Bismarck himself, at this time and during the first period of his administration, by the emperor and the diplomats, it appears now strangely comical. They could not bring themselves to regard him as serious, and were thrown completely off their guard by his consummate acting. As late as 1865, when he visited the French emperor at Biarritz, the latter, while listening to his harangues during the promenades which they took together on the beach, would slyly press the arm of Prosper Merimée, and even whispered once in his ear: “He is crazy.” M. Benedetti in the following year told General Govone that he considered Bismarck to be “a maniacal diplomat,” adding that he had _long known his man_, and had _followed him up_ for fifteen years. There is something grimly amusing in this play of the cat and the mice, notwithstanding its tragical results and the pity we must feel for the victims who thought themselves so extremely astute, but were lured on by one deeper in craft than they were, as easily as the meditative, solemn bruin was enticed by Reynard the fox to go after honey.