Years afterward I reminded Mr. Huxley of this, and asked him had he ever met Lord Hardwicke again.
"No, never; and I regret it. But we did not move quite in the same orbits. I have hardly seen anybody since who made such an impression on me. It's not a question of orbits, it's a question of men."
I asked Lord Hardwicke about the same time whether he remembered meeting Mr. Huxley.
"Remember? How many Huxleys are there in the world that you should suppose I could forget this one?"
It is one of the distinctions of English life in general, and of London, to which New York will perhaps some day attain, that sooner or later it brings together men and women, each of the first rank in his or her own department and each unlike the other. They have long understood here that a society which is not various ends in monotony; and of all forms of dulness that is the dullest.
CHAPTER XLIII
A PERSONAL REMINISCENCE OF THE LATE EMPEROR FREDERICK
It used to be said that English sympathies were given to Austria and not to Prussia in the war of 1866 because the Austrian railway officials were so much more polite than the Prussian. Of the fact that the English wished Austria and not Prussia to win there is no doubt. The railway reason was perhaps a reason, if not the reason. The organization of Prussia was at that time, as the organization of Germany, civil and military, now is, the finest in the world. But flexibility is not one of its merits; still less is it distinguished by consideration for the rights of the non-military and non-official German world. The English were then, as now, a travelling people; and their authority, if I may use such a word, on the Continent was greater, or seemed greater, then than now, because the competition was less. Americans had not then begun to swarm across the Atlantic as tourists, nor was the American language heard on every hill-side of the Tyrol and on the battlefields of Silesia. It was all English, and the English beyond question found Austria a more agreeable pleasure-ground than the wind-swept plateaus of her grim neighbour to the north.
In those days and for many years to come the English had taken and kept possession of Homburg, the pretty watering-place near Frankfort. As in so many other matters, the fashion was set by the late King, then Prince of Wales, whom his fellow-subjects, and presently not a few Americans, followed in a loyal spirit. They followed him not less loyally when he forsook Homburg and journeyed further afield to Marienbad. For the truth is the Germans, and especially the North Germans, had rediscovered Homburg, and the streets where for so many years the English accent had been heard, and almost no other, grew suddenly hoarse with Teutonic gutturals. I don't say that this invasion drove him elsewhere. He was himself as much German as English. But when his yearly visits in August ceased the English surrendered Homburg to its real owners, albeit they rather resented what they called their usurpation.