costumes and designed the war-chariots to be used in the ballet.  The notion was to rehabilitate the reputation of Asurbanipal, the second-last King of Assyria, whom the Greeks called “Sardanapalus,” who reigned in Nineveh six hundred years before Christ, over Ethiopia, Babylon and Egypt, and whom Lord Byron, accepting the Greek story, represented as the most effeminate and debauched monarch the world had ever known.

Professor Delitzsch, with a wealth of recondite learning, showed, on the contrary, that Sardanapalus was a wise and liberal-minded monarch, who, rather than fall into the hands of the Medes, built himself a pyre in a chamber of his palace and perished on it with his wives, his children, and his treasure.  The whole four acts, with the various ballets, gave a perfectly faithful representation of the period as described by Diodorus and Herodotus, and as plastically shown on the reliefs discovered at Nineveh by Sir Henry Layard and subsequently by German excavators.  Over L10,000 was spent upon the production, and the public were worked up to a great pitch of curiosity concerning it.  But it was a complete failure as far as the public were concerned.  “Heavens!” exclaimed one critic, “what a bore!” This, however, was not the fault of the Emperor, but was due to want of interest on the part of a public whose enthusiasm for the events and characters of times so remote could only be kindled by a genius, and a dramatic one.  The Emperor is no such genius, nor had he one at command.

XI.

THE NEW CENTURY (continued)

1902-1904

King George V has hardly been sufficiently long on the English throne for a contemporary to judge of the personal relations that exist between his Majesty and the Emperor as chief representatives of their respective nations.  The King of England was, until June, 1913, hindered by various circumstances from paying a visit to the Court of Berlin, and rumours were current that relations between the two rulers were not as friendly as they might and should be.  There is now every indication that though the relations of people to people and Government to Government vary in degrees of coolness or warmth, the two monarchs are on perfectly good terms of cousinship and amity.

A visit paid by King George, when Prince of Wales, to the Emperor in Potsdam at the opening of 1902 testified to the goodwill that then subsisted between them.  It was the evening before the Emperor’s birthday, when the Emperor, at a dinner given by the officers of King Edward’s German regiment, the 1st Dragoon Guards, addressed the English Heir Apparent in words of hearty welcome.  The address was not a long one, but in it the Emperor characteristically seized on the motto of the Prince of Wales, “Ich dien” (I serve), to make it the text of a laudatory reference to his young guest’s conduct and career.  In its course the Emperor touched