influence. When to this we add, that the sword-duel is rather a trial of skill in fencing than any thing dangerous, and that a scratch across the cheek, or prick into a stuffed jerkin, is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the worst of its accidents, fears on the subject diminish at a rapid rate. If, however, any one thinks these youths had better be at their books than crossing swords or swallowing choppins, I assure him I am quite of the same opinion; and I here exhort the students, as soon as they get this volume, which they speedily will, to forsake the Hirschgasse and the Kneip, and follow the advice, but not the example of the English. Shall I advise them to imitate the students of Cambridge? Let any one read "The Student-Life of Cambridge" in a late number of the Westminster Review, and say whether that would be reasonable. Shall I advise them to practise the vice and the mockeries which are practised there, by those who give the most public and prominent character to the social student-life of England--for it is not meant to assert that the generality of the Oxford and Cambridge students are of such a class? Why, Kneips and the Hirschgasse are heaven and innocence to them. Shall I advise them to quit their songs for the grossnesses sung by the wild portion of the students at Cambridge and Oxford? No! the songs of the German students, even when on no higher a theme than wine, and with the bold free-spokenness which is startling to our modes of thinking, are the effusions of the first spirits of their nation, and are sung to some of the finest melodies which ever emanated from that most musical of people. It is here that the tables must be turned, and that we must call on the English to imitate the Germans, and not the Germans the English. If the English will drink, let them drink wine as cooling, and beer as thin and bitter, as the Germans; if they will fight duels, let them abandon bullets that fly through a man and let the soul out after them, and be content with a scratched nose or punctured padding. If they will sing over their wine, let them not sing the vile trash that is heard in the haunts of our students, but the spiritual effusions of such writers as Schiller, Goethe, Körner, Arndt, Claudius, Hauff, Follen, Uhland, etc. No, one cannot read of English students--of their guzzlings and their songs--without feeling a sense of commonplaceness, a something low, gross, unimaginative and vulgar.^[1] On the contrary, amid all the follies and mad frolics and nonsense of German student-life--of which God knows there is plenty--he must be destitute of poetry himself who does not feel it there. If there be a man who can read through this volume and not feel its poetry, and not perceive the high and beautiful sentiment which pervades it; the profound love of nature, and the glorious love of country,--let that man march off to Cambridge or Oxford; let him give his suppers or his breakfasts; let him hurry in his nightgown to morning prayers; let him become a first-rower, or a senior-wrangler if he will; but that man is no more fit to take his stand by the student revellers of Germany, than Caliban is by Hyperion. No, in the student-life, which is entered into as a brief season of youthful hilarity, which in this world can come but once; a season in which knowledge is not only to be gathered, but life to be enjoyed--friendships for life to be knit up--love, perhaps for life, to be kindled--and the spirit of patriotism to be cherished to a degree which no after-chills and oppressions of ordinary life shall ever be able utterly to extinguish; in this life there is a feeling and a sentiment to which our student-life is a stranger. It is from the bosom of this life that some of the noblest poets, the profoundest philosophers, and the most devoted patriots which the world ever saw, have gone forth. It was from the heart of this life that Theodore Körner sprung, for the cause of his country and mankind, and sung and fought and died; it was from this that Goethe and Schiller, Hauff and Tieck, and a thousand others, have issued to glorify valour, or consecrate patriotism, or beautify the regions of the human soul by their songs and their imaginative prose. It was from this that the whole body of ardent youth arose, and quitting their Kneips and their Chores, called all their country to reassert its liberty, to drive out its foes, and at the people's head, fought with the spirit of the ancient heroes, and chased from their soil for ever, the tyrant and overrunner of humbled Europe.

And yet there are those who are continually forgetting these things; asserting that all the student songs, and student clanship, and student freedom, end in smoke and vapour, and without any permanent result, and that they depart at the termination of their academical career their several ways, and sink into obscurity and insignificance. What! would they not have them become good citizens, sober judges, domestic men? But they who say that no high effects remain, know nothing of the youth of Germany. They cannot have seen how the new Rhine-song went through the whole country like an electric flash when France threatened to march to the banks of that noble river, and how every German student vowed if such a deed were perpetrated, they would go forth and fight to a man. They cannot know, as I do, that the loves and friendships formed by these youths are more permanent and indissoluble than any class of men with whom I have yet become acquainted; nor that in private society, where, and in my own house, I have seen much of them, they are amongst the most accomplished, gentlemanly, temperate, correctly-mannered, cordial-hearted, and intellectual men that European society possesses. But all such persons I willingly turn over to the perusal of this volume, the work of a young but learned author, who has recently passed, by a splendid examination, out of this student-life itself without having ever fought a single duel, or very probably got half or even quarter seas over. If the perusal of this volume should have the good effect of lessening amongst the German youth the tendency to the beer or the sword duel, and of inspiring our English youth with a more intellectual and poetical taste in their pleasures, certainly we may say, in the style of all good old prefaces, "that it will not have been written in vain."

Heidelberg, April 6th, 1841.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

General Plan, Officers, and Courts, of a German University--Charm of this life to those who have passed through it--Explanation of the term Bursché, or Student--Right to found or dissolve Universities, retained by the Sovereign Princes--Offices and mode of government--The Curatorium--Rector, Prorector--Senate, greater and less--Different orders of Professors and Teachers--mode of their remuneration--University Board of Finance--its Court of Justice--Academical freedom, and mode of matriculation--Inferior officers, and penalties for offences against the Academical laws--College terms--mode of Lecturing, and duties of Lecturers-- necessary Examinations of the Students, and consequent Certificates--Sciences taught--Privileges and endowments to enable young men without property to enjoy all the advantages of the Universities--the great extent to which this is made available, and great advantages to the State derived from it--Opinion of Goethe on this head--Great Men that this has produced--no German, however exalted in rank, can hold a high position in society, without making himself master of the knowledge thus opened to the people