the despicable part, in his view, she had played at Leipzig and later on at Waterloo. So his heroes were Blucher and his aidede-camp Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, Stein, the philosopher Fichte, and the poet Arndt. In temperament Treitschke was a combination of poet and soldier, but deafness which came upon him in his early youth prevented his following a military career. As he grew up, he passed through the universities, enamoured particularly with the study of German history, ultimately becoming, in 1859, a professor at Freiburg. Then he witnessed the war of 1866, the creation of the North German Confederation, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. All this was to him a movement towards freedom, and he regarded the efforts towards German unity, stimulated and led by Prussia, as a struggle for the realisation of liberty. Treitschke was, in fact, overflowing with an enthusiasm for freedom and for all those who were or had been in the van of the struggle for the liberties of peoples. So we find that his two greatest literary heroes, because of their powerful expression of free aspirations, were Milton and Byron; and believing as he did that Prussia was leading the German people into a promised land of freedom, Prussia claimed his wholehearted and most strenuous support. In order that German liberty should be realised it was necessary that Prussia should lead and command. At the feet of Prussia therefore should all good Germans lay their individual rights.
It is difficult for us in Britain to understand the influence which professors have always exercised in Germany. The lecture-room of the German professor has always been a centre of general if not national influence. So Treitschke as a professor found an opportunity to fight his part, as he conceived it, in the great struggle for liberty. A man of striking appearance, slim figure, marked nobility of feature and bearing, dark eyes and with a mass of thick dark hair, he delivered his lectures in impassioned utterances and with an almost prophetic inspiration. Such was the man who by word of mouth influenced the mind of the present and the past generations of Germans in the days of their youth. His lecture-hall, when he was professor at Berlin, has been said to have resembled the halls where in the middle ages throngs gathered to hear an Abelard, or during the Renaissance to hear Giordano Bruno or Pico della Mirandola. He spoke as though preaching a gospel— a gospel which was a combination of history and present-day politics, pointing out the paths of Germany's future greatness and how they necessarily led through struggle, warfare, and even despotic government to their destination.
Whilst thus occupied and supremely influential as a lecturer,
