Should you see Sir Walter Scott, be so kind as return to him my most grateful thanks for his dear and cheerful letter,—­a letter written in just that beautiful temper which makes one man feel himself to be worth something to another.  Say, too, that I received his Life of Napoleon, and have read it this winter—­in the evening and at night—­with attention from beginning to end.  To me it was full of meaning to observe how the first novelist of the century took upon himself a task and business, so apparently foreign to him, and passed under review with rapid stroke those important events of which it had been our fate to be eye-witnesses.  The division into chapters, embracing masses of intimately connected events, gives a clearness to the historical sequence that otherwise might have been only too easily confused, while, at the same time, the individual events in each chapter are described with a clearness and a vividness quite invaluable.

I read the work in the original, and the impression it made upon me was thus free from the disturbing influence of a foreign medium.  I found myself listening to the words of a patriotic Briton, who finds it impossible to regard the actions of the enemy with a favourable eye,—­an honest citizen this, whose desire is, that while political considerations shall always receive due weight, the demands of morality shall never be overlooked; one who, while the enemy is borne along in his wanton course of good fortune, cannot forbear to point with warning finger to the inevitable consequences, and in his bitterest disaster can with difficulty find him worthy of a tear.

The book was in yet another respect of the greatest importance to me, in that it brought back to my remembrance events through which I had lived—­now showing me much that I had overlooked, now transplanting me to some unexpected standpoint, thus forcing me to reconsider a question which I had looked upon as settled, and in a special manner putting me in a position to pass judgment upon the unfavourable critics of this book—­for these cannot fail—­and to estimate at their true value the objections which are sure to be made from their side.  From all this you will understand how the end of last year could have brought with it no gift more welcome to me than this book.  The work has become to me as it were a golden net, wherewith I can recover from out the waves of Lethe the shadowy pictures of my past life, and in that rich draught I am finding my present employment.

I intend making a few remarks to the same purpose in the next number of Kunst und Alterthum.[527]

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES: