which weigh out the innumerable and
delicate bits of pleasantry which give the charm to social life! The
words to relate the legends connected with the knights and castles of
chivalry, saints, witches, elves, spooks, and gypsies, the foreigners
among us never acquire, or at least never so as to have the ready and
delicate use of them in social life, until their foreign character has
become quite absorbed in the fully developed American, and the taste, if
not the material for picturing the customs and legends of the fatherland
are forever gone.

It is mainly North Germany with whose institutions we have become more
or less familiar through our newspaper literature, and the numbers of
students who have from time to time gone thither for educational
purposes. Some acquaintance has also been made with Baden and
Wirtemberg, in South Germany, as these principalities have a population
mainly Protestant; and Heidelberg, at least, has been a favorite resort
for American students. But the same is not true of Catholic South
Germany. Munich's collections and institutions of art--mainly the work
of the late and still living King Lewis I.--have, indeed, become
generally known. Mary Howitt, in her 'Art Student in Munich,' has given
us some graphic delineations of life there. The talented and witty
Baroness Tautphoens has done us still better service in her 'Initials'
and 'Quits,' in relation both to life in the capital and in the
mountains; yet the character, institutions, and customs of the people
remain an almost unexplored field to the American reader.

In the middle of the twelfth century Munich was still an insignificant
village on the Isar, and had not even been erected into a separate
parish. About this time Henry the Lion added to his duchy of Saxony,
that of Bavaria, and having destroyed the old town of Foehring, which
lay a little below the site of Munich on the other side of the river,
transferred to the latter place the market and the collection of the
customs, which had till then been held by the bishops of Freising with
the imperial consent. The emperor Frederic I., in the year 1158,
confirmed, against the remonstrances of Bishop Otho I., the doings of
Henry. The duke hastened to surround the village with a wall and moat to
afford protection to those who might choose to settle there, and in
twenty years it had become a city. But the duke fell into disgrace with
the emperor, and the latter revoked the rights he had gran