Moreover, we are engaged upon the study of a living man, holding a great position, possibly destined to do great things. All our thoughts of this living man are instinctively coloured by prejudices based upon his relations with his father, who is dead. Justice to William demands that we shall strive fairly to get at the opinions and feelings which swayed him and his advisers in their attitude of antagonism to our hero, his father. [Illustration: 0076] His critics say that Frederic was an actor. They do not insist upon his insincerity--in fact, for the most part credit him with honesty and candour--but regard him as the victim of hereditary histrionism. His mother, the late Empress Augusta, had always impressed Berliners in the same way--as playing in the _rôle_ of an exiled Princess, with her little property Court accessories, her little tea-party circle of imitation French _littérateurs_, and her “Mrs. Haller” sighs and headshakings over the coarseness and cruelty of the big roaring world outside. And her grandfather was that play-actor gone mad, Czar Paul of Russia, who tore the passion so into tatters that his own sons rose and killed him. Once given the key to this view of Frederic’s character, a strange cloud of corroborative witnesses are at hand. Take one example. Most of the pictures of him drawn at the period of his greatest popularity--during and just after the Franco-German war--pourtray him with a long-bowled porcelain pipe in his hand. The artists in the field made much of this: every war correspondent wrote about it. The effect upon the public mind was that of a kindly, unostentatious, pipe-loving burgher--and so lasting was it that when, seventeen years later, he was attacked by cancer, many good people hastened to ascribe it to excessive smoking. I had this same notion, too, and therefore was vastly surprised, in Berlin, years after, when a General Staff officer told me that Frederic rather disliked tobacco. I instanced the familiar pictures of him with his pipe. The instant reply was: “Ah, yes, that was like him. He always carried a pipe about at headquarters to produce an impression of comradeship on the soldiers, although it often made him sick.” It was hard work to credit this theory--until it was confirmed by a passage in Sir Morell Mackenzie’s book. In response to the physician’s question, Frederic said the report of his being a great smoker was “quite untrue, and that for many years he had hardly smoked at all.” He added that probably this report, coming from soldiers who had seen him sometimes solacing himself after a hard-fought battle with a pipe, had given him his “perfectly undeserved reputation” as a devotee of tobacco.* * “The Fatal Illness of Frederic the Noble,” p. 20.