MEETING OF MUNCHEN-GRATZ. 40J 



evident, that if the Revolution of July, and the Reform of England 

 are the declarations of the one extreme party, the Decree of the 

 Diet of Frankfort is the reply, which on the other side, the kings of 

 Europe make to it. 



The apparent apathy with which the German nation have borne 

 the suppression of their nascent liberties, was a matter of unbounded 

 surprise to all who had for the last twenty years listened to their 

 boastings ; their pretensions of patriotism, and of superiority in 

 literature assumed and too easily conceded to them. Our own 

 standard of the German character in general, having never come up 

 to that of their extravagant admirers, we confess our disappointment 

 has been comparatively less acute. The grand question agitated in 

 the last century, <f si un Allemand pent avoir de I' esprit" appears to us 

 as undecided as ever, at the present day ; at least, if by the word 

 esprit is understood taste in letters, and common sense in politics and 

 philosophy. A German is still the same laborious triflerin literature, 

 that he was an hundred years ago, and the land now as then, is over- 

 run by philologers and savants, the height of whose literary ambition 

 is to edite a classical author, or to hold a fierce and virulent contro- 

 versy concerning the Eolic Digamma. German literature, to be of 

 any avail in the approaching contest, must descend a little from her 

 sublime speculations and hazy heights, and be somewhat more con- 

 versant with whatever touches the physical necessities of man. She 

 has more need of making advances towards breaking her feudal 

 chains than of making any farther progress in the world of ideas 

 and sentiments. With what feelings must we regard the man who 

 can pass his life-time in meditating upon the summum bonum, when 

 he hiinself is at the beck of a petty prince, and his peasantry are 

 adscripti gleba within a few miles of his dwelling as was the case- 

 near Hamburgh not twenty years ago ! Cut off from participating 

 in any share of the government of their country, the citizens of easy 

 fortune retire into the insignificance of domestic life to dream of the 

 doctrines of the Stoic or Epicurean philosophy, the Ideologists and 

 sluggish and willing slaves trampled upon with impunity by every 

 , petty despot, the men whom Napoleon and Tiberius would have 

 "uled with a rod of iron. When will Germany cease to be other 

 "lan the " schiavi brutali" which Petrarch denominated them ! 

 ]uam parati ad servitutem homines ! But what matters it to a German 

 that he is taxed without representation, when he has Kant and 

 Schelling to console him. And what slings and arrows of out- 

 rageous fortune can touch him, when he can fiddle more learnedly 

 than the Greeks themselves. When Paganini himself is challenged 

 to a trial of skill on an Austrian theatre, can Germany attain to 

 higher glory ? 



Venimus ad summum fortunse ! 

 Psallimus Achivis doctius. HORACE. 



The voices of most men would have declared, that by the ordinance 

 of Frankfort, Germany was placed in the same situation as that in 

 which France was placed by the ordinances of July, and that it was 

 her duty to obtain in her turn, a position among nations, or resign 

 herself to a slavery, yet more intolerable than that which oppressed 



