Excerpt from The Story of the Hohenzollern One of the most wearisome and pointless of the many pedantries that the heaviness of German Culture imposed on the free spirit of European literature was the habit of beginning the account of some interesting person or phenomenon before and not at the beginning. A biographer was supposed to open the life-story of his hero by noticing the leading traits, not of that worthy himself, but of his great-aunt; these, it was confidently assumed, would go far to explain away any paradoxes of character that the subsequent pages might reveal. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition.

We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.