ns the plan for which Albert Duerer drew, with narrow
windows in the thick masonry of the towers, the battlements worn by
the pacing to and fro of sentinels in armour, and an ancient linden in
the court-yard, planted by an empress a thousand years ago it is said,
with as green a canopy to throw over the tourist to-day as it threw
over those old Hohenzollerns. Conrad transmitted to his descendants
his good head and strong arm, until at length becoming masters of
Baireuth and Anspach, they were Margraves and ranked among important
princes. Their seat now was at Culmbach, in the great castle of the
Plessenburg. I saw one May morning the grey walls of the old nest high
on its cliff at the junction of the red and white Main, threatening
still, for it is now a Bavarian prison. The power of the house grew
slowly. In one age it got Brandenburg, in another the great districts
of Ost and West Preussen; now it was possessions in Silesia, now again
territory on the Rhine. Power came sometimes through imperial gift,
sometimes through marriage, sometimes through purchase or diplomacy
or blows. From poor soldiers of fortune to counts, from counts to
princes, from princes to electors, and at last kings. Sometimes
they are unscrupulous, sometimes feeble, sometimes nobly heroic
and faithful; more often strong than weak in brain and hand.
The Hohenzollern tortoise keeps creeping forward in its history,
surpassing many a swift hare that once despised it in the race. I
believe it is the oldest princely line in Europe. There is certainly
none whose history on the whole is better. Margraf George of
Anspach-Baireuth was perhaps the finest character among the Protestant
princes of the Reformation, without whom the good fight could not have
been fought. When Charles V. besieged Metz in the winter (which, with
Lorraine, had just been torn from Germany by the French), and was
compelled by the cold to withdraw, it was a Hohenzollern prince, one
of the first soldiers of the time, who led the rear-guard over ground
which another Hohenzollern, Prince Frederick Charles, has again made
famous. Later, in Frederick the Great, the house furnished one of the
firmest hands that ever held a royal sceptre. His successors have been
men of power.

They are good types of their stock, and Prussia is worthy of the
leadership to which she is advancing. In the cathedral of Speyer stand
the statues of the mighty German Kaisers, who six hundred years ago
wore the purp