l
imitation of negligence, on the table; though the daughters may still
drop their _h's_, their vowels are studiously narrow; and it is only in
very primitive regions that they will consent to sit in a covered vehicle
without springs, which was once thought an advance in luxury on the
pillion.

The condition of the tenant-farmers and small proprietors in Germany is,
we imagine, about on a par, not, certainly, in material prosperity, but
in mental culture and habits, with that of the English farmers who were
beginning to be thought old-fashioned nearly fifty years ago, and if we
add to these the farm servants and laborers we shall have a class
approximating in its characteristics to the _Bauernthum_, or peasantry,
described by Riehl.

In Germany, perhaps more than in any other country, it is among the
peasantry that we must look for the historical type of the national
_physique_. In the towns this type has become so modified to express the
personality of the individual that even "family likeness" is often but
faintly marked. But the peasants may still be distinguished into groups,
by their physical peculiarities. In one part of the country we find a
longer-legged, in another a broader-shouldered race, which has inherited
these peculiarities for centuries. For example, in certain districts of
Hesse are seen long faces, with high foreheads, long, straight noses, and
small eyes, with arched eyebrows and large eyelids. On comparing these
physiognomies with the sculptures in the church of St. Elizabeth, at
Marburg, executed in the thirteenth century, it will be found that the
same old Hessian type of face has subsisted unchanged, with this
distinction only, that the sculptures represent princes and nobles, whose
features then bore the stamp of their race, while that stamp is now to be
found only among the peasants. A painter who wants to draw mediaeval
characters with historic truth must seek his models among the peasantry.
This explains why the old German painters gave the heads of their
subjects a greater uniformity of type than the painters of our day; the
race had not attained to a high degree of individualization in features
and expression. It indicates, too, that the cultured man acts more as an
individual, the peasant more as one of a group. Hans drives the plough,
lives, and thinks, just as Kunz does; and it is this fact that many
thousands of men are as like each other in thoughts and habits as so many
shee