here he could make
appointments for years to come.

This incident will intimate what an external view of this dark brown
mass of humanity would never have hinted,--that it contains men of
learning and parts. Could one go round and listen to each party by
itself, instead of hearing the low rumble which falls upon the ears of
the general observer, the profoundest problems of philosophy,
statesmanship, philology, geography, ethnography, and history would be
found undergoing the most searching examination. Fame says of _our_
politicians who rise to positions which ought to be occupied only by
statesmen, that they frequent low places and mingle with the boisterous
crowd. This is probably not a slander. But these men frequent such
places only for a purpose. Their tastes do not lead them thither. They
go no oftener than serves their purpose. Not so with the learned German
beer-drinker. He is in his own proper society. Chinese or Sanscrit,
Arabic or Coptic, the last discoveries in the interior of Africa or
about the North Pole, or the more recondite regions of chemistry or
mineralogy, may be the theme of a familiar discourse, which each of the
party may fully appreciate.

To these places, of course, only the men resort. Indeed, in this part of
Germany there is little of family-life. The members of the family take
their coffee separately, as each rises and is ready. The men quite
generally dine and sup away from home, and that, too, when their
business and their residence are in the same house, and the hotel or
eating-house is at a distance. An English gentleman told me of a German
friend of his who appeared in his seat in the beer-house on the evening
of his wedding-day; and to the suggestion that this was not quite right
to the newly married wife, he replied that it did indeed seem so, but he
thought it better not to encourage hopes destined to disappointment.
This may, too, have been one of those numerous instances in which the
parties had already spent many evenings together in such a way as to
have diminished the interest of both in each other's society on the
first evening of married life. A genuine Munich man would never be
embarrassed like the Parisian, of whom the well-known story is told,
that, having been accustomed to spend all his evenings in the
drawing-room of a certain lady, he was advised, on the death of her
husband, to marry her, and promptly replied with the question, "_Where,
then, should I spend my evenin