which has shown itself, with more or less emphasis, in monarch after monarch of the line.  Nor is it surprising that monarchs should take pleasure in the stage, since the theatre is one of the places which brings them and their subjects together in the enjoyment of common emotions, and shows them, if only at second hand, the domestic lives of millions, from personal acquaintance with which their royal birth and surroundings exclude them.

The Emperor treats all artists, male and female, in the same friendly and unaffected manner.  There is never the least soupcon of condescension in the one case or flirtation in the other, but in both a lively and often unexpectedly well-informed interest in the play or other artistic performance of the occasion, and in the actors’ or actresses’ personal records.  The nationality of the artist has apparently nothing to do with this interest.  The Emperor invites French, Italian, English, American or Scandinavian artists to the royal box after a performance as often as he invites the artists of his own country, and, once launched on a conversation, nothing gives him more pleasure than to expound his views on music, painting, or the drama, as the case may be.  “Tempo—­rhythm—­colour,” he has been heard to insist on to a conductor whom in the heat of his conviction he had gradually edged into a corner and before whom he stood with gesticulating arms—­“All the rest is Schwindel.”  At an entertainment given by Ambassador Jules Cambon at the French Embassy after the Morocco difficulty had been finally adjusted, he became so interested while talking to a group of French actors that high dignatories of the Empire, including Princes, the Imperial Chancellor and Ministers, standing in another part of the salon, grew impatient and had to detach one of their number to call the Emperor’s attention to their presence.  Since then, it is whispered, it has become the special function of an adjutant, when the occasion demands it, diplomatically and gently to withdraw the imperial causeur from too absorbing conversation.

Several anecdotes are current having reference to the Emperor as sportsman.  One of them, for example, mentions a loving-cup of Frederick William III’s time, kept at the hunting lodge of Letzlingen, which is filled with champagne and must be emptied at a draught by anyone visiting the lodge for the first time.  This is great fun for the Emperor, who a year or two ago made a number of Berlin guests, including Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Austrian Ambassador, Szoghenyi-Marich, the Secretary for the Navy, Admiral von Tirpitz, and the Crown Prince of Greece stand before him and drain the cup.  As the story goes, “the attempts of the guests to drink out of the heavy cup, which is fixed into a set of antlers in such a way as to make it difficult to drink without spilling the wine, caused great amusement.”