inward unity undiminished, and Germans and Swiss alike have reason to
congratulate themselves on it. After the great war, the Swiss had
honestly participated in the pleasures and sorrows of the German; they
also had suffered by the war, and were in political troubles; a
narrow-minded patrician government oppressed the country; there also,
energy, public spirit and conscience, had been weakened.

The following narrative paints the state of things at Baden, and
equally portrays the Bath life of Germans in the interior of the
Empire.

Bath Life in the year 1417.

The Florentine, Francis Poggio (1380-1459), one of the great Italians
who spread the Humanitarian literature throughout their native country,
then held the office of Papal secretary; in this capacity he was
actively employed at the Council of Constance, and visited Baden from
thence. He describes his impressions of travel in an elegant Latin
letter to his friend, the learned Nicolo Nicoli; he himself was then an
ecclesiastic. In order to understand thoroughly how much the
reformation of the Church, which took place a century later, was
brought about by the excited moral feeling of the people, we should pay
attention to the cool, haughty freedom of tone of the following letter.
Poggio was a great scholar and a prudent statesman; he was one of the
most refined among the highly cultivated Italians; nay, more, he had a
fierce, manly spirit, and was always exhorting his literary friends to
seriousness. But with his classical literature he had also adopted the
spirit of a distinguished Roman of the time of Tiberius, and it makes a
disagreeable impression to find how mildly and good-humouredly the
secretary of the Pope, the priest, the scholar, the offshoot of the
civilization of his time, viewed the profligacy of both ecclesiastics
and laity. His letter, which follows here, is abbreviated in some
places:--

"Baden itself affords the mind little or no diversion; but has in all
other respects such extraordinary charm, that I could often dream that
Venus had come from Cypress, for whatever the world contains of beauty
has assembled here, and so much do they uphold the customs of this
goddess, so fully do you find again her manners and dissoluteness, that
little as they may have read the speech of Heliogabalus, they appear to
be perfectly instructed by Nature herself.

"About a quarter of an hour's drive from the town, on the other side of
t