had lived in Scotland, his punishment would not have been banishment from it, but confinement within it." This description is unfortunately too true; and we shall take occasion from it to make one practical reflection, which may be of use to some future tourist. Always, when you can, enter Germany from the north; and then you will escape the vexation of Mrs Trollope, who, when leaving Tyrol and Salzburg behind her, and entering on the wide dreary plains of Bavaria, could find no occupation for her soul but to gaze from the backwindow of her carriage, with a visage lengthening with the distance, till the echo of her own thoughts greeted her in the utterance of a fellow-traveller, who sighed forth, I can see the snow still!" with a tone," says that sturdy female, "that might have melted the hardest heart." Our author from geographical description now proceeds to national character: and this part of his work we have found particularly edifying. No writer that we have met with seems to have so warmly sympathized with the excellencies, and at the same time so keenly observed the faults, of his countrymen. In the following remarks, on the appreciation of German character by foreigners, Weber displays his various reading to great advantage: "It has long been a fashion with foreign nations to misrepresent the German character. Bouhours, who stirred the oft-repeated question, whether Germans can have esprit? thought, like Swift, the most wonderful inventions of science belong to the darkest ages; printing, gunpowder, and the compass, to the most stupid nation in Europe-the Germans. Even the delicate Sterne calls bad manners German breeding. The Spaniards said of us-Homo longus raro sapiens. The Cardinal du Peron designates us la nation la plus brutale, ennemie de tous les etrangers, des esprits de bierre, et de poéle! Another Eminency has a fine conceit. He compares the European nations to a glass of wine into which a fly has fallen. The Italian, says he, sends away the glass, the Frenchman takes out the fly, and the German drinks fly and all. The spiritual gentleman does not seem to have known the English, otherwise he might have said, that John Bull would have thrown the glass against the wall with an indignant God damn.* Of all foreigners that I know, the Swede Oxenstiern (in his Pensées Diverses) is at once most pointed and most just in his estimate of our national character. L'Allemand est une creature, qui boit plus qu'elle ne plus porter, un tonneau qui contient plus qu'il ne parait, et un homme qui sait plus qu'il ne dit; j'y ajoute un homme d'honneur et de probité.' Montesquieu said, L'Allemagne est faite pour y voyager, l'Italie pour y sejourner, l'Angleterre pour y penser, la France pour y vivre.' This last may be true. Helvetius thought exactly like Swift, who, when Handel visited him, exclaimed-a genius and a German ! And Mercier is witty—' L'Allemand boit, fume, et s'engraisse sans souci ;' but he speaks of our good animal condition only in contrast with the meagre starved Parisians-so that his satire may be taken as a compliment. The English call that which we call kitchenLatin, German- Latin; and yet it is as true of themselves as Menage said it was of the French, non loquuntur Latine sed parlant Latinum. Lord Bristol had a strange conceit-though he was surely in his cups when he said it. The Germans, quoth he, may be divided into two classes, winedrinkers or knaves, and beer-drinkers or fools. But he has forgotten the schnapps-drinkers in the North; and he did not know the virtue of beer as I have known it, and as it stands very piously inscribed on the sign of a certain old inn: Gott fürchten macht selig Drum furchte Gott and trinke Bier,' "The Italians, above all men, hate us; but we may find praise as well as blame, in that teste di cavallo, which they repeat against us. Napoleon, *""Tis strange, the Hebrew word that means I am As Byron says, in a well known passage. We hope the present generation of tourists are doing much to wipe away this famous reproach from our English vernacular. that arch-Italian, has also said many wicked things to our prejudice, and done more; but I can forgive him all his impertinencies for the sake of that one sentence that is reported of him. Had I been a German prince, I should have rescued the nation from out the storms of time under one sceptre: thirty millions of Germans should have stood under my throne, and having once chosen, they would certainly never have abandoned meas GERMAN Emperor, I had never seen St Helena.' No nation has allowed itself so many oracular sentences against us as the French; every nation has its own quantity of conceited fools, but France more than any other; and if it be true, that in one period of our history such coxcombs were not infrequent in Germany, this is to be attributed to that swarm of French abbes and mamselles, to whom the education of our ingenuous youth was committed, and who induced French vices on us, when they should have been educing German virtues, (verzogen nicht erzogen.) "I shall not give myself the trouble seriously to refute all these polite sayings of our neighbours in regard to us; only I may remark, that the French seem to have abstracted their ideas of Germanism more from the Swiss, than from the Germans proper. They themselves almost compensate their calumnies by the phrase which they use-bon sens Allemand. We, however, are wise enough to be taught even by their vituperations; and when they are continually repeating, c'est un Allemand!-c'est bien Allemand!— we would do well to consider whether there may not be some ground for these expressions. Meanwhile, we are not backward, by all manner of familiar allusions, to repay their contempt; and if the Parisians boasted, j'ai un Baron Allemand dans mon ecurie-we had our French cooks, whom we were accustomed to designate, Marquis de cuisine." The virtues and vices of the German character are then described in detail." Pope Ganganelli compared the Italians to the fire; the French to the air; the English to the water; the Germans to the earth. Omne simile claudicat. The German is not so nimble, merry, and witty, as the Frenchman; the German jogs on at a slow trot, where the Frenchman springs about ventre à terre; but the German holds out longer. The German is not so proud, whimsical, and dry as the Briton; not so lazy, bigot. ed, and miserly as the Italian: but a plain downright honest unpretending specimen of humanity, indefatigable, solid, quiet, sensible, and valiantbut his good qualities have, for the most part, been overlooked, for no reason that I can see but the misfortune of his political constitution. What Tacitus said is still true-nullus mortalium ARMIS aut FIDE ante Germanos. Germany lies in the middle of Europe; and there is a certain wise harmonious medium in the intellectual character of our nation-we walk in the juste milieu which Christianity and philosophy have pointed out. Medium tenuere beati. "The great characteristic virtue, however, of the Germans, is their kind-heartedness, (herzlichkeit.) This is especially observable among the South Germans-kindly and warm are they, like a continued Easter-day or Christmas eve. Such a store of good nature have we, that I do not think we can boast a single first-rate satirical writer; and when we can boast a Swift, it will be high time for us to ordain a national fast; for a Swift cannot arise in Germany without a deep deterioration of the national character. Unsuspecting openness of heart has ever been, and is still an heirloom, as it were, among the Germans we have suffered much, and have been sadly maltreated by tyrants, both native and foreign; but we still remain the best and most moral among the cultivated nations of the earth; whence also, (according to the divine promise,) the general longevity of our countrymen. This I say not of myself-for it might seem selfrighteous: but I have heard it from many travellers; and it is the greater compliment, that civilisation does not always ensure morality. : "GEMUETHLICHKEIT, is a word that has been very much in fashion lately derived from gemüth, and is, I confess, a thing most peculiarly German.* The Romans had animus, but not ani * The word gemüthlich may be said to be as characteristic of the German people as comfortable is of the English. Gemüthlichkeit is a sort of inward comfort of the malitas. The intellectually beautiful is, indeed, peculiarly the property of the Germans, as the sensuously beautiful was of the Greeks; but the highest intellectual gifts never approach true greatness-want the true consecration of humanity when moral dignity is absent. That Englishman who knew Germany, sent his sons first thither to lay a foundation of solidity and earnestness, (Ernest is a true German name,) and not till then did he think it safe to send them to France and Italy in quest of external accomplishments. Would that our political regenerators were wise to return the compliment ! France is our next neighbour geographically only; we should send our public men to study politics in England. "With the Germans genius developes its virtue more in the root, with the French and Italians more in blossom and flowering, with the English more in the fruit. The Italians represent imagination, the French art, the English understanding, the Germans memory. In their colonies the Spaniards began with building a church and a cloister, the Britons with a public-house, the French with a fortress, (in which, however, there must be a dancing saloon,) and the Germans with clearing the ground. A riding master characterised the several nations by their different ways of riding, The English hop, the French ride like tailors, the Italians sit upon their ponies like a frog in the receiver of an air-pump, the Spaniards fall asleep on horseback, the Russians twist the upper part of their body like puppets; only the German sits steady like a man-man and horse are one; so also the Hungarians." Then follow some very pertinent remarks on that slowness of the German character, which the nimble Frenchmen, in their vain conceit, choose to consider synonymous with stupidity. "The royal oak, the favourite tree of our nation, requires centuries to bring it to perfection-and so do we. Even in these latter days of steamengines and railroads, did we not allow the 'grande nation' to play their pranks for twenty years before we seriously set ourselves to show them that the bêtes Allemandes can be, if not a great, at least a strong-grasping and hard-hitting nation so soon as they choose to hold together. And when our new Bund (the Confederation) shall really become a national bond, what may we not achieve? A simile is free to every one, and we shall stick to this national symbol of the oak, as at once more sublime and more true; while our neighbours may persist in caricaturing us from the model of a postillion-apparently their only one when they set themselves to draw German character. A postillion in the north is indeed the real incarnation of phlegm. Bad roads or good, bad or good horses and vehicles, curses or coaxings of the tourist-nothing discomposes him if his pipe only smokes and his schnapps is paid. Him in his monosyllabic dignity, 'Non vultus instantis tyranni Mente quatit solidâ, neque Auster, Dux inquieti turbidus Adriæ, Nec fulminantis magna Jovis manus.' "Nothing vexed the righteous spirit of our immortal Luther at Rome more than the rapidity of the Italian priests, who reeled off seven masses before he had finished one, and then bawled out to him, in the midst of his sacred office, passa! passa! With time comes help;-what waits long wears well; Rome was not built in a day;we have yet the evening of many days to see ;-put off's not put away;what does not come to-day will come to-morrow;-haste without hurry ;one step after another are true German proverbs, on which basis we lift up our national symbol, allMAEHLICH (by degrees.) We are slow to think and sure to act; and do not enviously (like the French) snap every thing by anticipation out of the mouth of posterity. Our sons also, we think, ought to have something to do, were it only to pay cur debts. How truly German are these names, Weilburg, Weilheim, Wartburg, Warthausen, Wartenfels, and hundreds such? * We manage public affairs as outward or English sort the Germans know so little, that they do not even pretend to be able to translate the word. Campe paraphrases Gemüth, "A longing in the depths of the soul darkly felt, but quiet, calm, and pleasurable."- Very German ! * German names of places, from the roots weilen, to tarry, and warten, to wait. we do our dinners,-one good thing after another, not all at once, as our French neighbours do. And is not nature with us?-before she has brought to perfection one lime-tree, millions of daisies have bloomed and faded. We are careful to quarry our stones before we advertise our architecture." Then follows a paragraph on French levity and German gravity: "The arch failing of our neighbours is levity ours is dullness. Foreign ers can no longer charge us with a base devotion to the pleasures of the table; but are they altogether in the wrong when they reproach us with a lumbering heaviness; with rudeness, strangely associated with a certain pusillanimous humility, morbid sensibility about trifles, pedantry, and a superstitious attachment to old things, merely because they are old? In the old bass-fiddle of Europe, the thickest string is the German, with deep tones, and slow vibrations; but once set a-going, it sounds away indefatigably, as it were to sound for ever. And yet the German can dance as well as the Frenchman; among the very few national characteristics he has, one is that of national dances: but a German will not willingly be seen dancing after forty, while a Frenchman dances on to sixty, and longer, though he has only half the use of his legs. On whose side is nature? dispute our claims altogether to the sunny playfulness of thought: but this French lady did not know a word of German, saw every thing only through the spectacles of Schlegel, and made no acquaintance with the German PEOPLE, among whom a broad humour is quite native, far richer, though not so sharp perhaps as a French bon-mot." Then follows a severe, but in some respects richly deserved, rating of German servility. We hope much of the subjoined remarks can only be considered as perfectly true, when applied to Germany as it was before the battle of Jena : : "Our ancestors deliberated on all subjects twice-first, under the influence of wine, then sober; and after that they acted. We, again, with the most honest love of order imaginable, which with us is so instinctive that many external regulations might well be spared, lost all elasticity of soul, and sank isolated into a dull tame submissiveness, which begot our wo ful spirit of imitation, our pompous concern about trifles, and our wonderful low estimate of our own dignity-a very dog's humility at times, altogether odious. This spirit of submission did not escape the quick eyes of our Gallican neighbours; and accordingly, when a policeman or a sentinel trenches upon the dignity of the citizen among them, you will hear them say in fire-Est ce qu'on me prend pour un Allemand? The English are familiarly represented ed under the type of a bull (John Bull). A bull has horns and uses them; but our personification was the German Michel, who allows himself to be kicked on the rear quietly, and then asks - Was beliebt? (what's your will?) Voltaire sang of Marshal de Saxe "Nowhere do we find so much unmeaning gravity as in Germany. This is especially remarkable in official persons. And yet, Rochefoucault, one hundred years ago, said, with equal beauty and truth—la gravité est un mystère du corps inventé pour couvrir le défaut de l'esprit.' The French, however, show that they have studied merely the outside of German character, when they imagine that wit, humour, and fun are altogether unknown in broad Germany; and even our own Johannes Von Müller goes too far when he says To see a German joke, is to see a natural incongruity-the great just as I remember a certain innkeeper, Haller dancing in a domino.' A who, when he wished particularly to Frenchman is more malicious when flatter me, said, Vous savez, Monhe says In our attempts to be sieur, je vous regarde presque comme witty, we are like butterflies with Français.' Here is national pride heavy boots on.' We are no poorer fooled to the top of its bent truly. But than others in the elegant garniture of Voltaire said something even worse mind, but have not yet acquired the than this:-When the Prussian solart of setting out our rich stores in an diers at Berlin, on one occasion, were enticing shape before the public eye. not performing their Roman evoluMadame De Staël, indeed, chooses to tions exactly according to his beau NO. CCXCVII. VOL. XLVIII, 'Et ce fier Saxon que l'on croit né parmi nous,' 1 ideal, the French philosophe, in the middle of a company of German princesses, was not ashamed to say, F j'ai demandé des hommes, et on me donne des Allemands!' Do these conceited Gauls still keep up the phrase Je ne suis pas assez Allemand pour croire cela? A tutor in Marshal Schomberg's family being rated for some fault, replied, • Parbleu! on me prendre pour un Allemand!'-to which the Marshal retorted, On a tort, on devroit vous prendre pour un sot.' The answer may serve for other occasions. "Our language mirrors our mind; and, in the 'respectful' phrases which Germans use in addressing titled personages, I see a sign of very great moral debasement. An Englishman sets his I in the front of the sentence: a German does not even dare to tag it behind, lest it should appear obtrusive: Ew: habe die Ehre zu melden' (to your Excellence have the honour to intimate.) Ich seems to be excluded from our polite conversation altogether, that it may appear so much the oftener in the Kantian philosophy. And these phrases are used, not by the lower classes only and by courtiers, but by men of talent, who should know what self-respect is. A collection of German dedications-even in these days-is enough to make a man ooze at every pore with indignation; our authors lay themselves at the feet of their patrons and lower if they could. Of a truth, the honest German is more skilled in the art of deserving praise than of dispensing it. I can tolerate the constant taking-off of the hatbut let a man not take his head off with it. To our want of self-respect I must attribute our deficiency in the literature of memoirs-a sort of books, when well written, among the very best and most instructive that are. Our biographies are as formal as funeral orations mere castra doloris, which squeeze out the sigh-anco io sonoa GERMAN!" To relieve this too true picture of the effects of the political degradation of the Germans on their national character, we are willing to cast a glance with our author on the historic grandeur of the Teutonic race, of which ourselves (English and Lowland Scots) are a branch : "After the fall of the mighty Roman empire, Germans took their place in leading the civilisation of the world. Our hoary forefathers, according to the most ancient accounts we have, were acquainted with the use of gold, iron, and letters, considerably advanced beyond North American savages. German manners and German character prevailed through the whole of the so-called middle ages. The Pope and the Emperor were the heads of the new civilisation. The Emperor was German; and notwithstanding his political battles with the Pope, the humanizing spirit of Christianity in those times was nowhere more powerful, and was received nowhere with a deeper sympathy, than in Germany. Then came the Crusades, in which our Hohenstauffen took so distinguished a part; and they were to us what the Trojan war was to the Greeks. True, we had no Homer to sing our triumphs; but there was something better alreadythe Bible. The Germans are arithmetically the 'great nation' of Europe; for, properly speaking, the Dutch, the Flemish, the Swiss, the Danes, the Swedes, all are Germans; and thus we may count sixty millions. Why, then, are we not great politically? A mighty, a great, a venerable, a valiant, accomplished people is politically a nullity-for want of UNITY. Want of unity destroyed in the bud the growing feeling of collective power; and as this power failed to be exercised, the faith in its existence came at last to be altogether doubted. History might have taught us something better-there had been moments, nay, eras in our history, when we seemed to act in concert, and force the respect of Europe: but history, the best of all teachers, has generally the worst of all scholars; and so, between one mischance and another, as Herder said, we found ourselves after the struggles of centuries an unmade Nation, (eine ungewordene nation.) Zeus Kronion destroyed us, for it was his pleasure thus.' "Brave as Romans, but not like them conquerors, we have never been conquered: our uncorrupted mothertongue bears the best testimony to this. Europe owes every thing to the Germans; from their horrid woods they emerged in native vigour, and sent fresh blood into the effeminate and torpid Roman world. The Roman soldiers had their tears ready, so soon as they |