An amusing example of the extraordinarily laboured stupidity with which
the Germans work their great lie factory, the Wolff Bureau, is to be found in a letter published in Thursday's Times, and alleged to be written by an American lady, the wife of an Austrian diplomatist. Any one who looks at the letter carefully will see at once that it is a concoction and that the vulgar, lively, heartless lady patriot is a fiction. The persons whom she reminds us of by her style and outlook are the frivolous, worldly, hard, smart German women drawn so amusingly by the author of Elizabeth and her German Garden. Bismarck, who was a past-master in the art of writing letters from " old Hungarian Knights," " French Republicans," and other stock characters, would, we feel sure, if the draft of the "letter from an Austrian diplomatist's American wife recently in London" had been brought to him by a subordinate, have sent the writer back with a flea in his ear for want of verisimilitude.
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