altogether surprised, to learn that quiet Germany had lighted her revolutionary pipe from the French insurrectionary fires; that Mannheim, Heidelberg, and Hanau, those notorious nests of democracy, had succeeded in perverting the minds of many throughout the circle of the Rhenish provinces; and that studentism, once comparatively harmless, had become utterly rampant throughout the land. For although we never could, even in our earlier years, take any deep pleasure in cultivating the society of the Burschenschaft, but, on the contrary, rather regarded them as a race to be eschewed by all who had a wholesome reverence for soap and a horror for the Kantean philosophy, we were not unpleased at the national spirit which they exhibited long ago; and more than once, in the vaults of the Himmels-leiter and Jammerthal, at Nuremberg, we have joined cordially in the chorus of defiance to French aggression—

That Germany, under her peculiar constitution, should retain her own, and that the boundaries should be strictly preserved, seemed to us a highly proper, laudable, and patriotic sentiment; but, when the Teutonic youth went further, and demanded an immediate return to the mediæval system, and the glorious times of the Empire, we must confess that their aspirations seemed to us to savour slightly of insanity. We are, constitutionally, an admirer of the ancient times. We do not think that people are happier, or wiser, or better, or that they fulfil one whit more conscientiously their duties to God and man, when cooped up and collected within the dingy alleys of a commercial town, instead of treading the free soil which gave their fathers birth. We are not especially affected to the over-increase of factories, neither would we award an ovation to any one for breeding up human beings expressly for the production of calico. But not, on that account, would we willingly recur to the days of the forays and the raids. We don't want to see the clans reintegrated, the philabeg on every hip, and the hills covered with caterans, each ettling at his skian-dhu. We have no desire to cross the Border of moonlight night at the head of a score of jackmen, and, more majorum, regale our ears with the lowing of the Northumbrian kine. We do not consider such a feat necessary, simply because a remote ancestor was afflicted with too earnest a desire for the improvement of his patrimonial breed of cattle, and, having been unluckily found on the wrong side of the Tweed, died, like a poet as he was, with some neck-verses in his mouth, at a place denominated Hairibee. But our German friends—more especially the students—have long been haunted by some such ideas. The Robbers of Schiller, and the Goetz von Berlichingen of Goëthe, have had a poisonous effect upon the fancy or fantasy of the young. They have long been dreaming of doublets, boots, and spurs, and it needed but a little thing to set them utterly crazy. Their modern school of painting has for years been even more mediæval than their literature; and what the poets began, Schnorr and Cornelius have been rapidly bringing to a head. No one who is intimate with the German character, will lightly undervalue the effect of such a popular sentiment, when an actual opportunity for outbreak is afforded in revolutionary times.

This feeling, absurd as it is, has been greatly favoured and fostered by the infinitesimal division of Germany at the Treaty of Vienna, and the maintenance as sovereignties of small states, which ought long ago to have been remorselessly absorbed. By that settlement Germany was declared to consist of no less than thirty-eight separate and independent states, with no other tie of union than an annual diet at Frankfort. Previous to the Revolutionary wars, there were actually about three hundred sovereign rulers in Germany, each of whom might have worn a crown, if he could only have found money enough to buy one. This was a miserable farce and a caricature, and it could not possibly last. The King of Man was a powerful potentate in comparison with some of these autocrats; and if there had been a royal house of Benbecula, the crown-prince of that insular Eden would have been a proper match for the daughter of their sublime Highnesses of Fugger-Kirchberg-Weisenborn, or Salm-Reifferscheid-Krautheim. The French invasion blew away a crowd of these little sovereigns, like mites from the surface of a cheese; but, very unfortunately, a tithe of them were permitted to clamber back. Some of the larger German states thought to fortify their position, and to obtain an ascendency in the Diet, by maintaining several of the minor principalities intact, and, in return, commanding their votes. Hence the retention as sovereign princedoms of the three Anhalts, the two Schwartzbergs, the two Hohenzollerns, the two houses of Reuss, the two Lippes, Waldeck, Lichtenstein, and Homburg—territories, the outlines of which you can hardly discover on an ordinary map of Europe, or even on one of Germany. These are the instances which we think the most objectionable and absurd, but the case of several others is not much better. For example, there are four sovereign Saxe Duchies, besides the kingdom of Saxony proper.

Thirty-eight, then, were preserved by the Congress of Vienna, whereas, for the sake of stability, there should not have been more than five. The remaining German states might have been absorbed, as were many more, into Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Hanover; and, in this way, power would have been consolidated, a balance preserved, and entire centralisation avoided. Instead of which, for more than thirty years there has been a constellation of princes and of petty courts throughout Germany, to its infinite detriment and discredit. Magnificent Lichtenstein, with a territory of two square miles, and about five thousand subjects, takes rank with imperial Austria; and Henry, styling himself the twenty-second of Reuss-Lobenstein and Ebersdorf, has as good a patrimonial sceptre as Frederick-William of Prussia. Out of all this, what could arise save endless wrangling and confusion?

The smaller states, especially those which border on the Rhine, gradually became the acknowledged hotbeds of sedition. It was there that the expatriated journalists and crack-brained patriotic poets sought refuge, when their articles, pamphlets, and ditties, became too strong for the stomach of the legitimate censor; and there they have been for years hatching treason upon unaddled eggs. The old influence exercised by France over the Rhenish Confederation has never utterly decayed. Each fresh insurrectionary leap in Paris has been followed by a convulsive movement in the western Germanic princedoms; and no pains have been spared for the dissemination of the republican propaganda. Even this evil might have been checked, had Austria and Prussia acted in unison and good faith towards each other; but, unfortunately for Europe, the policy of the latter power has always been of the most tortuous and deceptive kind. Prussia, raised to and maintained in the first class of European states, solely on the strength of her military armament, and jealous of the superior strength of her southern rival, has for many years been engaged in intrigues with the minor states, for the purpose of securing to herself an independent position, in the event of the dissolution of the great German confederation. Unable to obtain her object through a legitimate supremacy in the Diet, Prussia has gradually withdrawn from the proceedings of the Federal Congress, and apparently surrendered to Austria the command of that feeble body. But by means of the Zollverein, or Commercial League—a scheme which she maturely prepared and perseveringly pursued—Prussia had contrived to secure the adhesion of fully three-fourths of the