, called the Great. Once entertained,
the subject seized him as with the eye of Coleridge's mariner, and, in
spite of manifold efforts to get free, compelled him, so that he could
"not choose but" write on it. Again and again, as the magnitude of the
task became manifest, we find him doubting, hesitating, recalcitrating,
and yet captive. He began reading Jomini, Preuss, the king's own Memoirs
and Despatches, and groaned at the mountains through which he had to dig.
"Prussian Friedrich and the Pelion laid on Ossa of Prussian dry-as-dust
lay crushing me with the continual question, Dare I try it? Dare I not?"
At length, gathering himself together for the effort, he resolved, as
before in the case of Cromwell, to visit the scenes of which he was to
write. Hence the excursion to Germany of 1852, during which, with the
kindly-offered guidance of Mr. Neuberg, an accomplished German admirer of
some fortune resident in London, he made his first direct acquaintance
with the country of whose literature he had long been himself the English
interpreter. The outlines of the trip may be shortly condensed from the
letters written during its progress to his wife and mother. He reached
Rotterdam on September 1st; then after a night made sleepless by "noisy
nocturnal travellers and the most industrious cocks and clamorous bells"
he had ever heard, he sailed up the river to Bonn, where he consulted
books, saw "Father Arndt," and encountered some types of the German
professoriate, "miserable creatures lost in statistics.
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