our people be in a position to love the beautiful and
honour lofty ideals."

At the Berlin Art Museum next year, after praising the devotion of his
parents to art, and especially of his mother, "a nature," he said,
"about which poesy breathed," he continued:--

"The son of both stands before you as their heir and
executor: and so I regard it as my task, according to the
intention of my parents, to hold my hand over my German
people and its growing generation, to foster the love of
beauty in them, and to develop art in them; but only along
the lines and within the bounds drawn strictly by the
feelings in mankind for beauty and harmony."

The Emperor's speech to the sculptors, if it contains some
questionable statements, is a thoughtful address by one who is himself
an artist, though not perhaps an artist of a high class. His artistic
endowments, transmitted from his parents, have been already indicated.
In reference to them he said to the official conducting him over the
Marienburg in later years, when the official expressed surprise at the
Emperor's art-knowledge:--

"There is nothing wonderful in it. I was brought up in an
artistic atmosphere. My mother was an artist, and from my
earliest youth I have been surrounded by beautiful things.
Art is my friend and my recreation."

The highest praise of a work of art is to say of it that it pleased,
or would have pleased; his mother. Of her he said, "Every thought she
had was art, and to her everything, however simple, which was meant
for the use of life, was penetrated with beauty." When giving his
sanction to a plan, a park, a statue or a building he always
thinks--"Would it have pleased my parents--what would they have said
about it?" The Kaiser Friedrich Museum and the Kaiser Friedrich
Memorial Church, both in Berlin, testify to the Emperor's gratitude to
his parents for their artistic legacy.

He went, as we have seen, through the ordinary art drudgery of the
school, recognizing, no doubt, with Michael Angelo, with all good
artists, that correct drawing is the foundation of every art into
which drawing enters and applying himself industriously to it. As a
young soldier at Potsdam he spent a good deal of his time, during the
three years from 1880 to 1883, practising oil-painting under the
guidance of Herr Karl Salzmann, a distinguished Berlin painter. Among
the results of this instruction was a picture w