he beginning of the eighteenth century the first weekly
advertisers sprang up, and the Council of Frankfort-on-Main conceded to
the undertakers of it, a weekly list of baptisms, marriages, and
deaths, there was a general burst of displeasure; it was considered
insupportable that such private concerns should be made public. So
completely had the German become a private character.

There were few cities then in Germany on whose social life we can dwell
with satisfaction. Hamburg is perhaps the best specimen that can be
given. Even there war and its consequences had caused great
devastation, but the fresh air that blew from the wide ocean through
the streets of the honest citizens of a free town, soon invigorated
their energies. Their self-government, and position as a small state in
union with foreign powers, preserved their community from extreme
narrow-mindedness, and it appears that in the period of laxity and
weakness that followed the Thirty years' war, they became by their
energetic conduct the principal gainers. Land traffic with the interior
of Germany, as also nautical commerce across the North Sea and Atlantic
Ocean, recovered their elasticity soon after the termination of the
war. Hamburg envoys and agents negotiated with the States-general, and
at the court of Cromwell. The Hamburgers possessed not only a merchant
fleet, but also a small navy. Their two frigates were, more than once,
a terror to the pirates of the Mediterranean and of the German Ocean.
They convoyed, now Greenland and Archangel navigators, now great fleets
of from forty to fifty merchantmen, to Oporto, Lisbon, Cadiz, Malta,
and Leghorn, in short, wherever there were Hamburg settlements.

This commerce, inferior as it may be to that of the present day, was
perhaps, in proportion to that of other German seaports of the
seventeenth century, more important than now. The young Hamburgers went
then to the seaports of the German and Atlantic Ocean, and of the
Mediterranean, as they now do to America, and founded there commercial
houses on their own account. Thus was formed in Hamburg a
cosmopolitanism which is still characteristic of that great city. But
it was undoubtedly more difficult for that generation to conform
themselves to foreign customs, than for the present. It was not
devotion to the German empire, but an attachment to the customs of
their daily life and family ties, which made the Hamburgers then, as
now, rarely consider a foreign coun