rance the facts of
his career were vivid in my mind. He was a man of seventy-five and had
been a scholar almost from his cradle. He was known to me particularly
through his history of the popes, which was and perhaps is still the
judicial authority with regard to the line of pontiffs, but that was
only one book among many. He belonged to a class of which Germany has
been prolific, whose consciences assault them if they let their pens
lie idle, and who have no recourse in self-defence but building about
themselves a barricade of books. After researches in various fields,
von Ranke now was undertaking a history of the world, with no thought
apparently of a probable touch from the dart of death in the near
future; and he did indeed live until nearly ninety and long produced a
volume a year.

He entered presently from an inner room, rather a short, well-rounded
figure with a face marked by a clear eye and much vivacity. He
conversed well in English and was curious about American education and
offered, rather ludicrously, I remember, to exchange the publications
of the University of Berlin with those of the little fresh-water
college in which I was at that time a young teacher. Could the scholar
be aiming a sly sarcastic hit at the bareness of our educational
outposts in the West? But no, his frank look and voice showed that he
was unaware of the real conditions. The talk was not long, there was a
hearty expression of regard for Mr. Bancroft who was fully accepted by
the German learned world as one of their _Gelehrten_, trained as
he had been in youth in their schools, and in that day our best-known
historian. I bowed myself out respectfully from the presence of the
little man and sincerely hope that the merit of his great history is
in no way abated because I took a half-hour of his time.

I met Lepsius, the great Egyptian scholar, one afternoon in his
garden, a hale, straight man of sixty with abundant grey hair
surmounting a fine forehead, with blue eyes full of penetration behind
his spectacles. I had little knowledge of the subject he had studied
so profoundly and almost laughed outright when his pretty daughter
asked me if I had read her father's translation of the _Book of the
Dead_. Of von Ranke's themes I thought I knew something and was
more at ease with him, as with Mommsen whom I met about the same time.

Theodor Mommsen, more than any other, forty years ago, was the leading
historian of Germany. He began his