eople much bitter or contemptuous criticism of their rulers.
Moreover, I had brought away with me "German-National" impressions
from Plamann's preparatory school, conducted on Jahn's drill-system,
in which I lived from my sixth to my twelfth year. These impressions
remained in the stage of theoretical reflections, and were not strong
enough to extirpate my innate Prussian monarchical sentiments. My
historical sympathies remained on the side of authority. To my
childish ideas of justice Harmodius and Aristogeiton, as well as
Brutus, were criminals, and Tell a rebel and murderer. Every German
prince who resisted the Emperor before the Thirty Years' war roused my
ire; but from the Great Elector onwards I was partisan enough to take
an anti-imperial view, and to find it natural that things should have
been in readiness for the Seven Years' war. Yet the German-National
feeling remained so strong in me that, at the beginning of my
university life, I at once entered into relations with the
_Burschenschaft_, or group of students which made the promotion of a
national sentiment its aim. But, after personal intimacy with its
members, I disliked their refusal to "give satisfaction," as well as
their want of breeding in externals and of acquaintance with the forms
and manners of good society; and a still closer acquaintance bred an
aversion to the extravagance of their political views, based upon a
lack of either culture or knowledge of the conditions of life which
historical causes had brought into existence, and which I, with my
seventeen years, had had more opportunities of observing than most of
these students, for the most part older than myself. Their ideas gave
me the impression of an association between Utopian theories and
defective breeding. Nevertheless, I retained my own private National
sentiments, and my belief that in the near future events would lead to
German unity; in fact, I made a bet with my American friend Coffin
that this aim would be attained in twenty years.

In my first half-year at Goettingen occurred the Hambach festival[27]
(May 27, 1832), the "festal ode" of which still remains in my memory; in
my third the Frankfort outbreak[28](April 3, 1833). These manifestations
revolted me. Mob interference with political authority conflicted with
my Prussian schooling, and I returned to Berlin with less liberal
opinions than when I quitted it; but this reaction was again somewhat
mitigated when I was brought into