at could a corrupt tree bring forth, but
corrupt fruit? If some of the early lodges, like those of "La Felicite"
and "L'Ancre," to which women were admitted, resembled not a little the
Bacchic mysteries of old Rome, and like them called for the interference
of the police, still no great reform was to be expected, when those
Sovereign Masonic Princes, the "Emperors of the East and West,"
quarrelled--knights of the East against knights of the West--till they
were absorbed or crushed by the Lodge "Grand Orient," with Philippe
Egalite, Duc de Chartres, as their grand master, and as his
representative, the hero of the diamond necklace, and disciple of Count
Cagliostro--Louis, Prince de Rohan.

But if Freemasonry, among the frivolous and sensual French noblesse,
became utterly frivolous and sensual itself, it took a deeper, though a
questionably fantastic form, among the more serious and earnest German
nobility. Forgetful as they too often were of their duty to their
peoples--tyrannical, extravagant, debauched by French opinions, French
fashions, French luxuries, till they had begun to despise their native
speech, their native literature, almost their native land, and to hide
their native homeliness under a clumsy varnish of French outside
civilisation, which the years 1807-13 rubbed off them again with a brush
of iron--they were yet Germans at heart; and that German instinct for the
unseen--call it enthusiasm, mysticism, what you will, you cannot make it
anything but a human fact, and a most powerful, and (as I hold) most
blessed fact--that instinct for the unseen, I say, which gives peculiar
value to German philosophy, poetry, art, religion, and above all to
German family life, and which is just the complement needed to prevent
our English common-sense, matter-of-fact Lockism from degenerating into
materialism--that was only lying hidden, but not dead, in the German
spirit.

With the Germans, therefore, Freemasonry assumed a nobler and more
earnest shape. Dropping, very soon, that Lockite and _Philosophe_ tone
which had perhaps recommended it to Frederick the Great in his youth, it
became mediaevalist and mystic. It craved after a resuscitation of old
chivalrous spirit, and the virtues of the knightly ideal, and the old
German _biederkeit und tapferkeit_, which were all defiled and overlaid
by French fopperies. And not in vain; as no struggle after a noble aim,
however confused or fantastic, is ever in vain. Freemaso