The only activities of Pinckney’s mind were critical.  He was a wonderful orator, but he rarely spoke.  People said he could have been a great writer, but he never wrote, at least nothing original.  He was the art and continental-drama critic of several English and American reviews; in music, he was a Wagnerian, which debarred him from writing of it except in German; but the little Court Theatre at Carlsruhe has Wagner’s portrait over the drop-curtain, and the consul’s box was never empty when the mighty heathen legends were declaimed or the holy music of the Grail was sung.  In fiction of the earnest sort, and poetry, Pinckney’s critical pen showed a marvelous magic, striking the scant springs of the author’s inspiration through the most rocky ground of incident or style.  He had a curious sympathy with youthful tenderness.  But, after all, as every young compatriot who went to Baden said, what the deuce and all did he live in Baden for?  Miles Breeze had said it in ’Fifty, when he made the grand tour with his young wife, and dined with him in Baden-Baden; that is, when Breeze dined with him, for his young wife was indisposed and could not go.  Miles Breeze, junior, had said it, as late as ’Seventy-six, when he went abroad, ostensibly for instruction, after leaving college.  He had letters to Mr. Pinckney, who was very kind to the young Baltimorean, and greatly troubled the Grand Duke his Serenity by presenting him as a relative of the Bonapartes.  Many another American had said it, and even some leading politicians:  he might have held office at home:  but Pinckney continued to live in Carlsruhe.

His critical faculties seemed sharpened after his wife’s death, as his hair grew whiter; and if you remember how he looked before you must have noticed that the greatest change was in the expression of his face.  There was one faint downward line at either side of his mouth, and the counterpart at the eyes; n doubtful line which, faint as it was graven, gave a strange amount of shading to the face.  And in speaking of him still earlier, you must remember to take your india-rubber and rub out this line from his face.  This done, the face is still serious; but it has a certain light, a certain air of confidence, of determination, regretful though it be, which makes it loved by women.  Women can love a desperate, but never begin to love a beaten, cause.  Women fell in love with Pinckney, for the lightning does strike twice in the same place; but his race was rather that of Lohengrin than of the Asra, and he saw it, or seemed to see it, not.  Still, in these times those downward lines had not come, and there was a certain sober light in his face as of a sorrowful triumph.  This was in the epoch of his greatest interestingness to women.

When he first came to Carlsruhe, he was simply the new consul, nothing more; a handsome young man, almost in his honeymoon, with a young and pretty wife.  He had less presence in those days, and seemed absorbed in his new home, or deeply sunk in something; people at first fancied he was a poet, meditating a great work, which finished, he would soon leave Carlsruhe.  He never was seen to look at a woman, not overmuch at his wife, and was not yet popular in society.