ecluded life of a wealthy
family, but how earnest is the feeling of the child, how laboriously he
spends his days! The greatest enjoyment of the young boy is in
learning; he finds an inexhaustible source of elevation and enthusiasm
in the knowledge that he imbibes.

The narrator seeks his happiness in family life, in the duties of his
office, and in science and art. He forms an elevated and profound
conception of everything. Politics only disturb him. It was not till
the next generation that man's feelings were excited, their powers
awakened, and new qualities developed by the idea of a Fatherland.

CHAPTER X.

THE PERIOD OF RUIN.
(1800.)

Again did evil arise from France, and again did a new life spring from
the struggle against the enemy.

It was not the first time that that country had inflicted deep wounds
on German national strength, and had unintentionally awakened a new
power which victoriously arrested her progress. The policy of Richelieu
had been the most dangerous opponent of the German Empire, but at the
same time it had been obliged to support the Protestant party there, in
which lay the source of all later renovation. After him French
literature ruled the German mind for a century, and for a long time it
appeared as if the Academy of Paris and the classical drama were to
govern our taste, as did the tailors and peruke makers of the Seine.
But indignation and shame produced, in opposition to French art, a
poetry and science which, in spite of its cosmopolitan tendency, was
genuinely national. Now the heir of the French revolution brought
violent destruction on the declining empire, and gave his commands on
its ruins like a tyrannical ruler, till at last the Germans resolved to
drive him away, in order to take their affairs into their own hands.

Defenceless was the frontier against the invading stranger. Only on the
lower Rhine there was the Prussian realm, but along the other part of
the stream were the domains of ecclesiastical princes, and small
territories without any power of resistance. It was the four western
circles of the empire, the Upper Rhine, Suabia, Franconia, and Bavaria,
which the North Germans mockingly called the Empire.

Even in the Empire, the ecclesiastical territories and Bavaria were
very much behindhand, in comparison with Baden and Suabia. The example
of Frederic II. in Prussia,