that the system of repression was so strong and effective as to drive all the moderate minds away from politics; but this will hardly hold good in Württemberg. Yet the educated classes there seem to have been completely indifferent to such politics as there were. But there were very few.

Those who want to discover the conditions under which Hauff's earlier life passed should read (1) Goethe's Autobiography in Wahrheit and Dichtung, and (2) Histoire d'un Conscrit; and, by mixing the two well together, may arrive at some sort of idea what life was like in a small German state, on which were grafted the new horrors of a military despotism. It is not a pleasant picture, but if it bred a good many souls as dead to patriotism as Goethe's and Heine's, it also bred not a few Müllers and Uhlands and Arndts; and it bred Wilhelm Hauff. That Hauff, in his later years at least (if a man can be said to have later years who died at twenty-five), had caught much of the spirit of the heroes of the War of Liberation, is best seen from the few soul-stirring lyrics which he has left, especially the two odes which he wrote in 1823-4 on the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo; even more perhaps it is seen in his admiration for W. Müller, and in the affecting story that when on his deathbed he heard the news of the battle of Navarino, he cried, 'What news! I must go hence and tell it to Müller,' who preceded him to the grave by a few weeks.

Hauff and his brother were voracious readers. Their maternal grandfather, 'a learned jurist,' (one trembles to think what a learned German jurist must have been like in the first decade of this century,) had a good library, consisting chiefly of old Law and History books, but including also a considerable number of romances; 'Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith were there,' says his biographer, Gustav Schwab, in the life which he prefixed to the 1837 (first collected) edition of Hauff's works. Schwab relates, not without humour, how the boys would play at fortress building and sieges with some of the more ponderous of the volumes, and the delight which they took in battering down a breastwork composed of the 'Acta Pacis Westphalicæ,' perhaps at the very time at which the Congress of Vienna was engaged upon the same job. But in the way of reading, they battened chiefly upon the old German historical romances, Hardleder's 'Ursache des Deutschen Krieges' especially, and it was from works like these that Wilhelm caught that old-imperial swing and flow of ideas which carries us so powerfully through Lichtenstein and the 'Phantasien.' The plan of turning a boy loose in a library is sometimes justified by results, although not always in the way expected. But although Wilhelm got a certain amount of classics drilled into him at the cloister school of Blaubeuern, and afterwards studied 'Philology, Philosophy, and Theology,' from 1820-1824, at the University of Tübingen, 'more,' says Schwab, 'to please his mother than from any leaning of his own to those subjects,' he never could write Greek or Latin verses like his brother, or pass for anything but an essentially poor scholar. But several other people who have afforded some pleasure to the world at large have been essentially poor scholars.

This deficiency did not affect him much; his mother, though apparently not wealthy, had good interest, and procured for him, when he left the University, the position of private tutor in the family of 'the at that time War's-council's-President, later War's-minister von Hügel' at Stuttgart, where he remained two years, with apparently abundant leisure for exercising his talent for writing poetical romances and fairy tales, of which during the last two years of his life he poured forth an incessant stream. It is worth while noting that in one of these--the first part of the 'Memoirs of Satan' (not the completed edition of these memoirs as they now stand)--is a passage in which the author falls foul of the great Autocrat of German Literature apropos of some lines in Faust; which was a more daring thing for a young fellow of four-and-twenty to do than it is possible for a man living in a free country to imagine. The rash youth afterwards repented, and expunged the obnoxious passage when he finished the memoirs of his black Majesty.

Perhaps it would have been as well if there had been no expunging, at least we may dare to say so on this side of the water, where less and less divinity hedges the person of the great man-god of letters every day. Hauff, however, had a tender heart, and did not like to see what a big hole he had made by casting a stone at the man-god; and with the modesty of twenty-four he begged pardon. History does not say whether the man-god took any notice of him.

It is not, however, with the Memoirs of Satan, or with any but one of Hauff's works that we are now concerned. The 'Man in the Moon' was a scathing satire upon a school of story-book makers, popular at the time, and headed by one H. von Clauren, whose works we have not perused. 'Lichtenstein,' which has been dramatised, is not inferior to an inferior Waverley novel. These and many more are well known to English readers, but the 'Phantasien im Bremer Rathskeller' has never been translated, no doubt because of its dreadfully Rabelaisian morality in the matter of strong drink. What can you think of a man who dedicates his book to the 'lovers of wine,' and takes for his motto the passage from Othello which appears at the head of the story? We do not intend to defend him; we ourselves are by no means the pair of ultra-Pickwickian topers, that a cursory perusal of the motto and dedication would lead the reader to believe: and we are quite aware that there are to be no more cakes and ale in this world; we are a little sorry for it, that is all. As for Hauff we will let him speak for himself; we have no reason whatever to believe that he had more than a poetical and literary affection for the juice of the grape.

Hauff had grown tired of being a private tutor in 1826, and spent the profits of Lichtenstein in a journey to the North of Germany and to Paris in the latter half of that year. It was upon that occasion that he visited Bremen, although not upon the errand imagined in the text. On his return to the South in 1827 he became Editor of the 'Morning News for the Educated Classes,' to which his brother, who succeeded him in the editorship, was already a contributor. This paper survived till 1865, when it expired a few months after the death of Hermann Hauff, whom from all we know of him we imagine to have been a much more business-like editor than Wilhelm. Contemporarily with this responsible post Wilhelm took to himself a wife, one of his own cousins, who bore him a daughter but a few days before his death. He died of fever on the 18th November, 1827. Prefixed to the edition of 1853 is a very pretty little poem of L. Uhland's on the occasion, and also a funeral oration by Mr. Court Chaplain Grüneisen, who was his cousin, both of which were recited over his grave in true German fashion. If we could believe all that this worthy priest said--and we have not a scrap of evidence to the contrary--Wilhelm Hauff's life must indeed have been a bright and happy one; 'Wonnezeit voll holder Träume,' as he himself called the season of youth. Apparently he made no enemies, and he made every one whom he chose his friend; his tender affection for his mother seems to have been the mainspring of his existence; to his bride he had been long attached in a half playful spirit, that wanted only the shadow of a difficulty to withdraw their love into those regions of romance in which his mind delighted to dwell. It was about a month before his death that he produced, as a reminiscence of his northern journey, the following story, entitled--

'The Wine-Ghosts of Bremen.'

NOTE (written before the late incorporation of the Hanse towns