nce Imperial, the Crown Princess of
Prussia, her sister, Princess Alice, and the Grand Duchess of
Leuchtenberg. Before this stand, on horseback on one side, sat the
Grand Duke Vladimir, the Czarevitch (the present Czar of Russia),
the Crown Prince of Prussia (since the lamented Emperor Frederick),
Prince Gortschakoff (the Russian prime minister), Count Bismarck, and
an English nobleman; on the other side were the Duc de Leuchtenberg,
the Duke of Mecklenburg, and the Prince of Hesse Darmstadt; while
in the centre of them all rode the czar, with Napoleon III. on
one hand, and on the other the king of prussia.[1]

[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]

How little could any of those who looked upon that throng of royal
personages imagine what in little more than two years was coming
on them all!

The emperor was fond of literature, and when drawn into a literary
discussion, his half-closed eyes would gleam with sudden light,
and his criticisms would be both witty and valuable. During his
later years, harassed by sickness and perplexities of all kinds,
his greatest pleasure was to shut himself up in his study, and
there work upon his "Life of Caesar." He wrote it entirely himself,
though he had many learned men in France and Germany employed in
looking up references and making extracts for him. The book was
considered a work of genuine merit. To its author it was a labor of
love. He threw into it all his experience of life, all his theories,
all his Napoleonic convictions; for in Caesar and Napoleon he found
many parallels. He hoped to be admitted as a literary man into the
French Academy, and he meant to base his claim upon this book.

I have said nothing of the cares that oppressed the emperor in
connection with the war in the Crimea, which was prolonged far
beyond his expectations; of the campaign in Italy, broken short
off by threats of intervention made by the king of Prussia, and
followed by feelings of disappointment and revenge on the part of
the Italians; of the intervention of the emperor in 1866, after
the battle of Sadowa, to check the triumphant march of the Prussian
army through Austria; nor of the bombs of Orsini, which led to a
rupture of the friendliness between France and England, breaking
up the cordial relations which existed between the two courts in
1857, and reviving that panic about French invasion which seems
periodically to attack Englishmen ever since the great scare in
the days of Bonaparte. T