ther fear nor interest that can induce him
to lie to me; to whom I can speak, not as sovereign to subject, but as
man to man, and of whose private conversation my courtiers and
officials are not yet suspicious or jealous. You shall never repent
any confidence you give to me."

My interest in and respect for the strange character so manifestly
suited for, so intensely weary of, the grandest position that man
could fill, increased with each successive interview. I never envied
that greatness which seems to most men so enviable. The servitude of a
constitutional King, so often a puppet in the hands of the worst and
meanest of men--those who prostitute their powers as rulers of a State
to their interests as chiefs of a faction--must seem pitiable to any
rational manhood. But even the autocracy of the Sultan or the Czar
seems ill to compensate the utter isolation of the throne; the lonely
grandeur of one who can hardly have a friend, since he can never have
an equal, among those around him. I do not wonder that a tinge of
melancholo-mania is so often perceptible in the chiefs of that great
House whose Oriental absolutism is only "tempered by assassination."
But an Earthly sovereign may now and then meet his fellow-sovereigns,
whether as friends or foes, on terms of frank hatred or loyal
openness. His domestic relations, though never secure and simple as
those of other men, may relieve him at times from the oppressive sense
of his sublime solitude; and to his wife, at any rate, he may for a
few minutes or hours be the husband and not the king. But the absolute
Ruler of this lesser world had neither equal friends nor open foes,
neither wife nor child. How natural then his weariness of his own
life; how inevitable his impatient scorn of those to whom that life
was devoted! A despot not even accountable to God--a Prince who, till
he conversed with me, never knew that the universe contained his equal
or his like--it spoke much, both for the natural strength and
soundness of his intellect and for the excellence of his education,
that he was so sane a man, so earnest, active, and just a ruler. His
reign was signalised by a better police, a more even administration of
justice, a greater efficiency, judgment, and energy in the execution
of great works of public utility, than his realm had known for a
thousand years; and his duty was done as diligently and
conscientiously as if he had known that conscience was the voice of a
supreme