was to spend a night on the journey to St. Petersburg with his old friend, Herr von Below, at Hohendorf, in East Prussia; he had scarcely reached the house when he fell dangerously ill of inflammation of the lungs and rheumatic fever.  He remained here all the winter, and it was not until the beginning of March, 1860, that he was well enough to return to Berlin.  Leopold von Gerlach, who met him shortly afterwards, speaks of him as still looking wretchedly ill.  This prolonged illness forms an epoch in his life.  He never recovered the freshness and strength of his youth.  It left a nervous irritation and restlessness which often greatly interfered with his political work and made the immense labour which came upon him doubly distasteful.  He loses the good humour which had been characteristic of him in early life; he became irritable and more exacting.  He spent the next three months in Berlin attending the meetings of the Herrenhaus, and giving a silent vote in favour of the Government measures; he considered it was his duty as a servant of the State to support the Government, though he did not agree with the Liberal policy which in internal affairs they adopted.  At this time he stood almost completely alone.  His opinions on the Italian question had brought about a complete breach with his old friends.  Since the conclusion of the war, public opinion in Germany, as in England, had veered round.  The success of Cavour had raised a desire to imitate him; a strong impulse had been given to the national feeling, and a society, the National Verein, had been founded to further the cause of United Germany under Prussian leadership.  The question of the recognition of the new Kingdom of Italy was becoming prominent; all the Liberal party laid much stress on this.  The Prince Regent, however, was averse to an act by which he might seem to express his approval of the forcible expulsion of princes from their thrones.  As the national and liberal feeling in the country grew, his monarchical principles seemed to be strengthened.  The opinions which Bismarck was known to hold on the French alliance had got into the papers and were much exaggerated; he had plenty of enemies to take care that it should be said that he wished Prussia to join with France; to do as Piedmont had done, and by the cession of the left bank of the Rhine to France to receive the assistance of Napoleon in annexing the smaller states.  In his letters of this period Bismarck constantly protests against the truth of these accusations.  “If I am to go to the devil,” he writes, “it will at least not be a French one.  Do not take me for a Bonapartist, only for a very ambitious Prussian.”  It is at this time that his last letter to Gerlach was written.  They had met at the end of April, and Gerlach wrote to protest against the opinion to which Bismarck had given expression: