of a court and capital can supply--gossip which is eagerly listened
to by the annual crowd of foreigners who spend a few days in Munich
to visit the Pinakothek, listen to a Wagner opera, and catch, if
possible, a glimpse of the romantic young king; and is by them carried
home to find public circulation at third hand through the columns of
sensation newspapers. And when to this personal criticism is added
the strife of opinion over his political acts, and the ill-will of the
extreme Church party in consequence of his liberal tendencies, it may
easily be believed that his real character is but little known, and is
in many cases deliberately falsified. A brief review of the facts and
circumstances of his reign may serve to correct, in some degree, the
false impressions which have so long prevailed.

In 1864, in the midst of the confusion of the Schleswig-Holstein war,
which was then agitating all Germany, King Max died, and his eldest
son, Ludwig, only nineteen years old, was summoned from the quiet
routine of his university studies to ascend the throne of Bavaria. In
childhood his health had been extremely delicate, and on that account
he had been educated in unusual privacy--training which, joined to
his naturally reserved and meditative disposition, and the various
disenchantments of his public career, may satisfactorily account for
his present confirmed love of solitude. The position to which he was
so unexpectedly called was an exceedingly difficult one for a mind
filled, as his was, with ideal visions of liberty and progress,
and totally inexperienced in the ways of a selfish world and in the
profundity of Jesuitical intrigues; and the unavoidable embarrassments
of the time had been increased by the course of his immediate
predecessors. Ludwig I., through a sentimental love of the
picturesque, had encouraged the multiplication of monasteries and
convents and brotherhoods of wandering friars, and Maximilian, though