In the troubled history of Anglo-German relations is to be recorded the presence, in June of this year, of King Edward VII at Kiel with a squadron of battleships to pay an official visit to his nephew.  The two fleets, those sunny days, formed a splendid spectacle—­the two mightiest police forces, the Emperor would probably agree in saying, the world could produce.  In fact, the Emperor had some such thought in mind, for he addressed King Edward as follows:—­

“Your Majesty has been welcomed by the thunder of the guns of the German fleet.  It is the youngest navy in the world and an expression of the reviving sea-power of the new German Empire, founded by the late great Emperor, designed for the protection of the Empire’s trade and territory, and intended, equally with the German army, for the preservation of peace.”

One or two other incidents of interest in the Emperor’s life may close the record of this year.  One of them was the arrival of the Italian composer, Leoncavallo, in Berlin, to hand the Emperor the text of the opera “Der Roland von Berlin,” Leoncavallo had composed at the Emperor’s express request.  Roland was a “strong, valiant and pious” knight of Charlemagne’s time—­like the Emperor, let us say—­who originally hailed from Brittany—­that lone and lovely Cinderella of France—­and afterwards, for some unexplained reason, came to be the type of municipal independence in Germany.

During the summer the Emperor and the Empress made an excursion, when on the Saalburg, to the statues of the Roman Emperors Hadrian and Severus.  Did the Emperor recall, one wonders, as he stood before the figure of Hadrian, that pagan monarch’s address to his soul:—­

     “Animula vagula, blandula,
     Hospes, comesque corporis,
     Quae nunc abibis in loca,
     Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
     Nee, ut soles, dabis jocos?”

It sounds a little gloomy as a quotation, but, fortunately for Germany and the Emperor, for “nunc” can be put, pace the poet, the indefinite, yet all too definite, “aliquando.”

XII.

MOROCCO

1905

The Emperor started for Tangier towards the end of March, but before that he had got through imperial business of a miscellaneous kind which exemplifies the life he leads practically at all times.

In January he had exchanged telegrams with the Czar and the Mikado concerning his bestowal of the Order of Merit on Generals Stoessel and Nogi, asking permission to bestow the Order and receiving expressions of consent.  Another telegram went to the composer Leoncavallo in Naples, congratulating him on the success there of his “Roland von Berlin.”  In February, the Emperor opened an international Automobile Exhibition in Berlin, received Prince Charles, Infanta of Spain, and the King of Bulgaria, unveiled a monument to his ancestor, Admiral Coligny, who was killed in the Bartholomew