cheer and comfort. _The Journalists_,
too, was opportune, for it called attention to a class of men whose
work was as important as it was unappreciated. Up to 1848, the year of
the revolution, the press had been under such strict censorship that
any frank discussion of public matters had been out of the question.
But since then distinguished writers, like Freytag himself, had taken
the helm. Even when not radical, they were dreaded by the
reactionaries, and even Freytag escaped arrest in Prussia only by
hastily becoming a court official of his friend the Duke of
Saxe-Coburg and Gotha--within whose domains he already owned an estate
and was in the habit of residing for a portion of each year--and thus
renouncing his Prussian citizenship. Even Freytag's _Pictures from the
German Past_ may be said to have been opportune. Already, for a
generation, the new school of scientific historians--the Rankes, the
Wattenbachs, the Waitzs, the Giesebrechts--had been piling up their
discoveries, and collating and publishing manuscripts describing the
results of their labors. They lived on too high a plane for the
ordinary reader. Freytag did not attempt to "popularize" them by cheap
methods. He served as an interpreter between the two extremes. He
chose a type of facts that would have seemed trivial to the great
pathfinders, worked them up with care from the sources, and by his
literary art made them more than acceptable to the world at large. In
these _Pictures from the German Past_, as in the six volumes of the
series of historical romances entitled _The Ancestors_, a patriotic
purpose was not wanting. Freytag wished to show his Germans that they
had a history to be proud of, a history whose continuity was unbroken;
the nation had been through great vicissitudes, but everything had
tended to prove that the German has an inexhaustible fund of reserve
force. Certain national traits, certain legal institutions, could be
followed back almost to the dawn of history, and it would be found
that the Germans of the first centuries of our era were not nearly so
barbarous as had been supposed.

And so with a wonderful talent for selecting typical and essential
facts and not overburdening his narrative with detail he leads us down
the ages. The hero of his introductory romance in _The Ancestors_ is a
Vandal chieftain who settles among the Thuringians at the time of the
great wandering of the nations--the hero of the last of the series is
a jou