But undoubtedly William II was always much more the son of his mother than of his father, which seems, indeed, to be the rule in families of less exalted rank. We have seen how the Empress really received from her father the training of a man, and, it may be added, of an extremely versatile man. If fate had compelled her eldest son to earn his own living in a private station, it is extraordinary to think of the number of professions in any one of which he could have attained a competence, if not indeed high distinction. From his mother, rather than from his father, he inherited a great appetite for work and an extraordinary aptitude for detail; and he showed himself at different times to have had in him the making, not only of a soldier and a sailor, but of a musician, a poet, an artist, a preacher, and an orator. Compare this with his grandfather, the old Emperor, who, if he had not been born in the purple, could only have been a soldier, and not, it must be added, one who could have held very high commands. Compare him again with his father; the Emperor Frederick, if he had not been born in the purple, though he certainly showed greater military capacity than the old Emperor, nevertheless would probably not have been happy or successful in any private station other than that of a great moral teacher. The Emperor William's affinity to his mother in character, temperament, and accomplishments becomes the more striking the more it is investigated. He shared with her a certain impulsiveness, a deficiency in what is ordinarily called tact, which really amounts to a constitutional inability to appreciate the effect which a particular word or action will necessarily have on other people. This, which seems a negative quality, is really a positive one, interwoven with a high courage and a contempt for the mean little dictates of conventional prudence, which have always commanded the admiration of generous minds. This remarkable similarity between mother and son assuredly furnishes the key to the somewhat complex question of their relationships at different periods. They were in fact too much alike for their relations to be always harmonious. The widowed Empress did not owe all her unhappiness to Bismarck alone. In 1889 Gustav Freytag published a volume of Reminiscences of the Emperor Frederick which attracted a great amount of attention, more perhaps than they intrinsically deserved. But Freytag's position among German writers as novelist, poet, dramatist, and historian, was so great that everything he wrote had its importance, and in addition to that it was known that he had at one time been admitted to the confidence of the then Crown Prince, whose political Liberalism he appeared to share.