Freytag was a Silesian by birth, and this no doubt did him no harm with the Emperor Frederick, who was warmly attached to Silesia, and delighted in the graphic pictures of life in that province which Freytag drew in his novels. The Empress made Freytag's acquaintance in the early years of her married life--indeed, the first German novel which she read with her husband was Freytag's _Soll und Haben_. The novelist had been presented to the Prince Consort by his patron, Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and it was natural in all the circumstances that the Crown Princess and her husband should have shown the great writer marked signs of favour. It is all the more extraordinary, therefore, that in his Reminiscences Freytag should have drawn such a picture of the Emperor Frederick as must have deeply distressed his then newly-made widow. It was a picture which she herself knew to be inaccurate, and which indeed could only gratify the personal hostility of Bismarck and his adherents. There is no need to linger long over this picture, but it demands some notice because it, so to speak, gathers together in a convenient form the principal features of what may be called the Bismarckian view of both the Empress and her husband. It has been said that Freytag apparently shared the Crown Prince's Liberalism, but he was also steeped in Prussian particularism, and it was this that brought him to his almost blind admiration of Bismarck, and rendered him incapable of appreciating the political conceptions of the Emperor Frederick. Freytag, indeed, was a bad judge of character, the presentation of which was his weak point as a novelist. Allusion has already been made to the fact that the Crown Prince invited Freytag to accompany him with the Third Army in the Franco-German War, and the Reminiscences terminate soon after the battle of Sedan. After 1870 the Crown Prince hardly ever saw Freytag, and never with any real intimacy; yet on this slender foundation of knowledge the novelist revived, under the specious cloak of affection, some of the worst charges of the Reptile Press, and of the insulting commentary which Bismarck published on the late Emperor's diary. The principal charge for our purposes here is that the Crown Prince was subjected to foreign influence, and was entirely dominated by his wife. In effect Freytag suggests that through the Crown Princess, Princess Alice, and other members of the English Royal family, important secrets of German military movements reached the French commanders. "Both the Empress Frederick and Princess Alice," he says, "wrote to their august mother and the family in London, and what crossed the North Sea could be sent to France again in letters a few hours later. It is therefore not unnatural that the French learned by way of England a variety of news about our army which with greater propriety would have remained concealed."