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Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White — Volume 2 by Andrew Dickson White
page 43 of 497 (08%)
for the Russian Empress, which Miss Wolfe had given the
Metropolitan Museum at New York; and in reply to my
congratulations upon a recent successful public speech of her
eldest son, a student at Bonn, she had dwelt, in a motherly way,
upon the difficulties which environ a future sovereign at a great
university. In more recent days, and especially during the years
before her death, she had been, at her table in Berlin and at her
castle of Kronberg, especially courteous. There comes back to me
pleasantly a kindly retort of hers. I had spoken to her of a
portrait of George III which had interested me at the old castle
of Homburg nearly forty years before. It had been sent to his
daughter, the Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg, who had evidently
wished to see her father's face as it had really become; for it
represented the King, not in the gold-laced uniform, not in the
trim wig not in the jauntily tied queue of his official portraits
and statues, but as he was: in confinement, wretched and
demented; in a slouching gown, with a face sad beyond expression;
his long, white hair falling about it and over it; of all
portraits in the world, save that, at Florence, of Charles V in
his old age, the saddest. So, the conversation drifting upon
George III and upon the old feeling between the United States and
Great Britain, now so happily changed, I happened to say, "It is
a remembrance of mine, now hard to realize, that I was brought up
to ABHOR the memory of George III." At this she smiled and
answered, "That was very unjust; for I was brought up to ADORE
the memory of Washington." Then she spoke at length regarding the
feeling of her father and mother toward the United States during
our Civil War, saying that again and again she had heard her
father argue to her mother, Queen Victoria, for the Union and
against slavery. She discussed current matters of world politics
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