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lowed them all. Let me turn the cock, sir; I admire your hospitable plan of the cask and spigot, it saves so much trouble in drawing corks—is the water boiling?—So let us hear no more talk of the vast treasures of German literature. There are not six of them authors worth reading, in what is properly called literature. Learning and antiquities I leave out of the question—they are industrious moles, and grub excellently well—and yet it will take many millions of moles to make a Bentley. In history they have but one name worth mentioning John Von Müller and he is one of the sons of Anak, and will sit in the opposite scale to Gibbon, and move not an inch towards the beam—their tribe of gentlemen who write with ease—their story-tellers, romancers, parlour poets, and so forth, are utterly below contempt. Our annual bards and authors are worth them all put together; and as to our novelists, properly so called, taking them as painters of life and manners, who would think of comparing our second, third, or even our fourth-rates with the miserable Tromlitsses and Van der Veldes, or Haufts and Spindlers, who rule the roast in their own country, and tempt good-natured young lords to introduce them here? Did any human being ever succeed in getting to the end of a German novel of ordinary life, without a weariness of the flesh that suggested indistinct thoughts of suicide? Not one: I have tried it a hundred times—and this is what I have been aiming at—their books, my dear sir, are not only stupid but disgusting—I have met with very few that were not positively shocking from the insight they gave me into the depravity of a whole people. The French, heaven knows, are bad enough; but with them it is a paroxysm, a fever of impropriety, that is limited to a certain set and will pass. Besides, the French abominations are intended to be abominable; an unnatural state of manners is chosen as the subject of representation, and accordingly it is treated in as unnatural a way as possible. For the horrors and iniquities, f a kind that shock and disgust us so much in their performances, are limited to the romantic school—the insane men of perverted genius, like Victor Hugo, who, instead of exhausting old worlds and then imagining new, begin the process by imagining a new world, and peopling it with the creations of their distempered fancies. But nobody meets such things in the novels purporting to be stories of real life. Paul de Kock himself is a humorist, gross, coarse, and "improper," but he sets out with the intention of decribing gross, coarse, and improper people. There are thieves, drunkards, dissolute men, and naughty women, in all countries; we may wonder at people's taste in painting such manners and modes of thinking, but we are not to blame any one but the individual who chooses to bedaub his pallet with such colours. The Germans, on the other hand, are more revolting in their novels of common life than in their more ambitious imaginings. The light is let in upon us through chinks and crannies of the story, enabling us to see the horrible state of manners into which the whole nation is sunk; for observe, my dear sir, I don't allude to the scenes brought forward in their books to be looked at, shuddered at, and admired as pieces of sublime painting; what I mean is the unconscious air with which such revelations are made,—the author seeing nothing strange in the incident he is describing; and talking of it as a matter perhaps of daily occurrence. And these are the people that have written and roared about themselves, till they have persuaded all Europe, or, at least, the rising generation in England, that they are an honest, and pure, and innocent people; simple in all their habits; and, in fact, only a better specimen of what was once the character of our Saxon ancestors. German integrity, German truth, are the constant parrot song of every national author. They have even made a substantive out of the word German; and with them Germanism or Deutscheit, means every virtue under heaven—modesty, I have no doubt, included. You nod, my dear sir, as if you approved of that—and in itself any thing that gives a strong national feeling, a pride in one's own country, a zeal to maintain its honour—is an admirable thing. I have not forgotten the thunders of applause that followed the clap-traps at our theatres about British courage —British power—hearts of oak, and things of that kind: admirable clap-traps they were—but they had their effect sir. There wasn't a god in the gallery that wouldn't have licked three