In the year 1866 Carlyle said: "The only man appointed by God to be His viceregent here on earth in these days, and knowing he was so appointed and bent with his whole soul on doing, and able to do God's work," is M. de Bismarck. If this be true, then M. de Bismarck has found a most valuable ally and colleague in the present Premier of Russia. It is of these two men, Prince Bismarck, and Prince Gortchakof, the Chancellor of Germany, and the Chancellor of all the Russias, that this book treats. T

The good old Plutarch, in commencing his long and charming series of Parallels with the account of the lives of Theseus and Romulus, experiences some difficulty in justifying such an association of the two heroes; he can find in them only very vague traits of resemblance, and these by no means striking. "To strength they both joined great powers of mind, both carried off women by violence, and the one as well as the other was not exempted from domestic miseries; indeed, toward the end of their l

However great one wishes to make the share of genius in the work of M. de Bismarck, one cannot deny that a great part also comes from the unforeseen, from an extraordinary combination of circumstances, in one word, from that goddess Fortune whom the minnesinger of the Middle Ages did not cease to praise in song, whom Dante himself did not fail to extol in the immortal verses, "The course always luminous like a star in heaven, and the decree always hidden like a serpent in the grass." Without dou

In the little salon of the house Jessé, situated on the Rue de Provence at Versailles, in the first of the sad month of November, 1870, sat by the side of the fire two illustrious speakers, whose movements Europe in suspense watched with the most intense anxiety. Leaning his elbow on a writing table, on which "two bottles with candles in their necks did service as lights," [76] M. de Bismarck had asked M. Thiers for permission to smoke a cigar, while he rested from the negotiations pursued durin

"They have provided themselves elsewhere," the French ambassador at the court of William I. sadly wrote, in the last days of the month of August, 1866, on seeing Prussia so brusquely break off the dilatory negotiations concerning Belgium; and it is just to add that he has never since ceased to clearly appreciate the situation, and to keep his country constantly on its guard as regards the confidential harmony and absolute agreement between the two courts of Berlin and St. Petersburg after the mi

On the 9th January, 1873, Napoleon III. passed sadly away from the land of exile at Chiselhurst, and a short time after, the 27th March, William I. entered on the sixty-sixth year of a life in which assuredly the most extraordinary favors of fortune have not been wanting. Germany celebrated the fête of its new emperor with transports of joy, the more noisy and sincere since the monarch had waited for this anniversary to ratify a last convention with the government of Versailles, a convention whi

On Monday, the 16th April (according to the Russian calendar, the 4th), 1866, an attempt was made on the life of Alexander II., Emperor of Russia. The would-be assassin was a Russian named Dmitry Karakozoff, a member of the order of the Nihilists. The rescuer of the Czar was a newly-emancipated serf, Ossip Ivanovitch Komissaroff by name. The facts of the attempted assassination are as follows: In the morning of that day Komissaroff started for the chapel built by Peter the Great on an island in