If he had been momentarily softened by the pathetic conditions surrounding his father’s funeral, his heart steeled itself again soon enough under the sway of the Bismarcks. He entered with gratuitous zest upon a course of demonstrative disrespect to his father’s memory. Frederic had been born in the spacious, rambling New Palace at Potsdam, and in adult life had made it his principal home. Here all his children save William were born, and here William himself spent his boyhood, as Mr. Bigelow has so pleasantly told us, * playing with his brother Henry in their attic nursery, or cruising in their little toy frigate on the neighbouring lakes. Here Frederic at the end came home to die, and in the last fortnight of his life formally decreed that the name of the New Palace should henceforth be Friedrichskron--or Frederic’s Crown. * New Review, August, 1889. All who have seen the splendid edifice, embowered in the ancient royal forest parks, will recognize the poetic and historic fitness of the name. From its centre rises a dome, surmounted by three female figures supporting an enormous kingly crown. There was a time when Europe talked as much about this emblematic dome as we did a year or so ago about the Eiffel Tower, though for widely different reasons. It was not remarkable from any scientific point of view, but it embodied in visible bronze a colossal insult levelled by Frederic the Great at the three most powerful women in the world. When that tireless creature emerged from the Seven Years’ War, he began busying himself by the construction of this palace. Everybody had supposed him to be ruined financially, but he had his father’s secret hoards almost intact, and during the six years 1763-9 drew from them over £2,000,000 to complete this structure. With characteristic insolence he reared upon the dome, in the act of upholding his crown, three naked figures having the faces of Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa of Austria, and Mme. Pompadour of France, each with her back turned toward her respective country. The irony was coarse, but perhaps it may be forgiven to a man who had so notably come through the prolonged life-and-death struggle forced upon him by these women. At all events, it was an intelligent and proper thing to give the palace the name of Friedrichskron, and one would think that, even if the change had been less fitting than it was, the wish of the dying man about the house of his birth could not but command respect. One of William’s first acts was to order the discontinuance of the new name, and in his proclamation he ostentatiously reverted to the former usage of “New Palace.”