the judgments of experts.

"Unquestionably his mind is of an unusual order. It is a
facile, quickly moving instrument; it works in flashes; it
assimilates seemingly without effort, and it is at its best
under the highest pressure. The Kaiser is not to be laughed
at for wanting to know all there is to be known, but he may
justly be criticized for failing to distinguish between the
attempt and its failure....

"Is it all charlatanerie? Is it all of a part with his
speech in Russian to the regiment of which the Czar made him
honorary colonel, a studied trumpery effort, designed for a
momentary effect? Is the Kaiser just glitter and tinsel,
impulse and rhapsody, with nothing solid beneath? Is it his
supreme object to make an impression at any cost, to force,
like another Nero, the popular applause by arts more
becoming to a _cabotin_ than a sovereign? Vanity,
restlessness, a consuming desire for the palm without the
dust--an intense and theatrical egotism--are these the
qualities that give the clue to his character and actions?

"I do not think so altogether. The Kaiser has scattered too
much. In an age of specialists on many subjects he speaks
like an amateur. He is always the hero, and often the
victim, of his own imagination; like a star actor, he cannot
bear to be outshone; he is morbidly, almost pruriently,
conscious of the effect he is producing. And on all matters
of intellect and taste his influence makes for blatant
mediocrity. But he is not meretricious; at bottom he is not
by any means as superficial and insincere as he often seems.
He is one of those men in whom an instinct becomes an
immutable truth, an idea a conviction, and a suspicion a
certainty, by an almost instantaneous process; and, the
process completed, action follows forthwith. The Kaiser is
always resolved to do the right thing; the right thing, by
some quaint but invariable coincidence, is whatever he is
resolved to do."

These appreciations from afar may be as sound as they are brilliant,
but they rather refer to the non-essential parts of the character of
the Emperor in the first flush of imperial glory than to the essential
character as it has developed with the years.

As a man--he will be dealt with as monarch presently--his essential
character must be judged from his