red to speak
out. Under these circumstances, the English reader will perhaps be obliged
to us for taking the trouble to sketch out a short outline of the life and
temper of Baron Stein from such scanty materials as time and chance have
thrown in our way; and he will, at the same time, pardon the great
deficiencies that must necessarily exist in the execution of such a
work.[17]

Henry Frederick Charles, _of_ and _at_ Stein, (_vom_ and _zum_ Stein!) was
born in the year 1757, of an old and noble family at Nassau on the Lahn.
His father belonged to that higher class of nobility, according to the old
German constitution, who held immediately of the Empire, (Reichs:
unmittelbare und Landbarfreie,)--a descent which had perhaps a not
unimportant effect in influencing the position which Stein afterwards
assumed; for while the Baron always acted in the spirit rather of the
middle classes than of the princes and their courts, and indeed often
indulged in the strongest expressions of contempt for the whole body of
princes in Germany, he never forgot his own character as a free and
independent baron of the German empire, and was, notwithstanding the
popular character of his great measures, in his tone of mind as much
aristocratic as democratic. Intended by his father to take office under
the Imperial government, he was sent first to Goettingen to study public
law and history, and then to Wetzlar, the seat of the Imperial chamber;
but the name of the Empire in those days had already lost its power over
the minds of ambitious youth. Frederick the Great was the guiding star of
the time; and, as if prophetic of the death-blow that awaited the
crumbling old edifice from the hand of Napoleon in 1806, Stein, so early
as 1780, entered the Prussian service as director of the mines
(_Bergrath_) at Wetter, in Westphalia. In 1784 we find him ambassador at
Aschaffenburg. He was then made president of all the Westphalian chambers,
and in active connexion with this province we find him remaining till
1804, when, on occasion of the death of Struensee, one of the Prussian
ministers, he was called to Berlin, and made minister of finance and of
trade and commerce by Frederick William III. In this capacity he remained
till the opening of the year 1807, when, as the _Conversations Lexikon_
asserts, being at Koenigsberg with the king, after the battle of Jena, "on
account of some differences with the cabinet" he resigned his situation,
and retired to h