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 Zzviedineck-Siiden/wrsi : Deutsche Geschichte 383 gift of phrase and epigram that is not always sufficiently under control. One can understand why M. Denis is one of the most popular of French academic lecturers, and is led to surmise that the printed page has not always sufficiently felt the repentances of the proof-reading stage. One of the least agreeable manifestations of these characteristics is the Gallic sneer that frequently seems irrepressible; as when at the end of a passage of generous appreciation with respect to the National Association of 1859, he adds, " gymnastes, tireurs, orpheonistes, savants, d'un bout a I'autre du territoire, se grisaient de biere et d'eloquence " (p. 230), or speaks of King William in 1866 as still in need " de quelques mois pour rassurer sa conscience et pour mettre Jehovah de son cote " (p. 322). An instructive standpoint for the comparison of these books is with respect to their attitude toward the victorious Prussian. Both writers are strongly appreciative, surprisingly generous in their concessions; but while the language of the Frenchman is frequently the more unreserved, the feeling of the Deutsch-Oesterreicher is unquestionably the more sin- cere. Zwiedineck-Sudenhorst's Austrian spirit is betrayed in his in- tense bitterness against those (as Schwarzenberg and Beust) whom he regards as responsible for the mismanagement of Austrian interests in the building up of the new Germany ; in the humiliated regret with which he acknowledges that Austria deserved defeat; in the exultation of his narrative of the Austrian defeats of Italy in 1866; throughout his whole narrative of the Prussian advance, however, he vies with Sybel and Treitschke in unfaltering justification and approval, and hardly lets us detect that his point of view is German rather than Prussian (see his denunciation of Hannoverian politics, pp. 159 and 330; also his rhapsody over the sacred union of hearts between Bismarck and King William, p. 243). He rarely controverts Sybel or questions the finality of the Gcdankcn und Erinncntngen. Part of the explanation of this is doubtless to be found in the sympathy with Prussian internal polity of the born conservative and aristocrat (see his frequent denunciations of both Prussian and Austrian liberalism, as pp. 224, 237, 268), and in the present conditions of Austrian politics. Denis, on the other hand, while making every concession to Prussian astuteness and efficiency, and at times using extravagant language (as when he speaks, p. 297, of the "sublime esthetique " of the Moltke mobilization of 1870), frequently turns on the Teutonic conqueror with a bitter gibe or disingenuously plucks away his laurels by excessive and undignified condemnation of those with whom he had to do (as when, p. 302, after acknowledging the mastery of Bismarck in the Schleswig-Holstein matter, he points out his good luck, especially in that Napoleon was " un illumine. Gort- chakov un fat, les ministres anglais des poltrons et Rechberg un sot"). One suspects further that what is real in the Frenchman's admiration of Prussia is largely a real sympathy with the materially successful, a genuine acceptance of the lessons as to worldly efficiency that France