not bound to try? And with
the advice and help of such a man as you----"

"Me!" cried the librarian. "Now, God forbid!"

Otto, though he was in no very smiling humour, could not forbear to
smile. "Yet I was told last night," he laughed, "that with a man like me
to impersonate, and a man like you to touch the springs, a very possible
government could be composed."

"Now I wonder in what diseased imagination," Gotthold said, "that
preposterous monster saw the light of day?"

"It was one of your own trade--a writer: one Roederer," said Otto.

"Roederer! an ignorant puppy!" cried the librarian.

"You are ungrateful," said Otto. "He is one of your professed admirers."

"Is he?" cried Gotthold, obviously impressed. "Come, that is a good
account of the young man. I must read his stuff again. It is the rather
to his credit, as our views are opposite. The east and west are not more
opposite. Can I have converted him? But no; the incident belongs to
Fairyland."

"You are not then," asked the Prince, "an authoritarian?"

"I? God bless me, no!" said Gotthold. "I am a red, dear child."

"That brings me then to my next point, and by a natural transition. If I
am so clearly unfitted for my post," the Prince asked: "if my friends
admit it, if my subjects clamour for my downfall, if revolution is
preparing at this hour, must I not go forth to meet the inevitable?
should I not save these horrors and be done with these absurdities? in a
word, should I not abdicate? O, believe me, I feel the ridicule, the
vast abuse of language," he added, wincing, "but even a principulus like
me cannot resign; he must make a great gesture, and come buskined forth,
and abdicate."

"Ay," said Gotthold, "or else stay where he is. What gnat has bitten you
to-day? Do you not know that you are touching, with lay hands, the very
holiest inwards of philosophy, where madness dwells? Ay, Otto, madness;
for in the serene temples of the wise, the inmost shrine, which we
carefully keep locked, is full of spiders' webs. All men, all, are
fundamentally useless; nature tolerates, she does not need, she does not
use them: sterile flowers! All--down to the fellow swinking in a byre,
whom fools point out for the exception--all are useless; all weave ropes
of sand; or, like a child that has breathed on a window, write and
obliterate, write and obliterate, idle words! Talk of it no more. That
way, I tell you, madness lies." The speaker rose from his chair and t