of the affairs of
its rapidly revolving world, as children on a whirligoround bestow their
attention on the wooden horse or cradle ahead of them, to escape from
giddiness and preserve a notion of identity. The professor is better
out of a circle that often confounds by lionizing, sometimes annoys by
abandoning, and always confuses. The school that teaches gently what
peril there is lest a cultivated head should still be coxcomb's, and the
collisions which may befall high-soaring minds, empty or full, is more
to be recommended than the sphere of incessant motion supplying it with
material.

Lands where the Comic spirit is obscure overhead are rank with raw crops
of matter. The traveller accustomed to smooth highways and people not
covered with burrs and prickles is amazed, amid so much that is fair and
cherishable, to come upon such curious barbarism. An Englishman paid
a visit of admiration to a professor in the Land of Culture, and was
introduced by him to another distinguished professor, to whom he took
so cordially as to walk out with him alone one afternoon. The first
professor, an erudite entirely worthy of the sentiment of scholarly
esteem prompting the visit, behaved (if we exclude the dagger) with the
vindictive jealousy of an injured Spanish beauty. After a short prelude
of gloom and obscure explosions, he discharged upon his faithless
admirer the bolts of passionate logic familiar to the ears of flighty
caballeros:--'Either I am a fit object of your admiration, or I am not.
Of these things one--either you are competent to judge, in which case
I stand condemned by you; or you are incompetent, and therefore
impertinent, and you may betake yourself to your country again,
hypocrite!' The admirer was for persuading the wounded scholar that it
is given to us to be able to admire two professors at a time. He was
driven forth.

Perhaps this might have occurred in any country, and a comedy of The
Pedant, discovering the greedy humanity within the dusty scholar, would
not bring it home to one in particular. I am mindful that it was in
Germany, when I observe that the Germans have gone through no comic
training to warn them of the sly, wise emanation eyeing them from aloft,
nor much of satirical. Heinrich Heine has not been enough to cause them
to smart and meditate. Nationally, as well as individually, when they
are excited they are in danger of the grotesque, as when, for instance,
they decline to listen to evidence