Germany has caught the St Vitus of revolution, and danced off, if not as distractedly, at all events in less connected step, and less defined figure, than its neighbour: and in this revolutionary frenzy Germany has assumed so ungenial an aspect—a manner so doubtful, so unpromising, so uncertain, as regards the next step it may be inclined to take in the jerkings of its abrupt and unregulated dance—that the gentle tourist-seekers of ease and pleasure have turned away in disgust from this heavy Meg Merrilees, who has forgotten even her scraps of song, and her long-pretended spirit of romance, and declined to visit her until she shall have somewhat recovered from her drunken fit of revolution, and become more decently behaved. The Rhine, then, has lost the last charm of foreign bustle and movement, with which he decked his old head, as with a crown of wild flowers, not unbecoming his gray hairs. He looks sad, sober, discontented, disappointed, mourning his lost old joys, and his lost glories, of which young Germany, in its revolutionary excitement, has despoiled him. His hotels are empty; landlords, too, have a forlorn air, and take to rattling their last _groschen_ in their pockets; and unhappy waiters get fat upon their inactivity, but, at the same time, pale with ill-humour at their diminished _trinkgelder_, and apprehension of losing their places altogether. Travellers’ visits have grown, like those of angels, “few and far between;” and as angels do the poor scanty tourists appear to be regarded—as munificent beings, in fact, from whom too much cannot be demanded and expected; for the Rhenish hotel-keepers, in pursuance of the system adopted by Parisian shopkeepers, in these days of revolutionary scarcity and destitution, seem determined to make those unhappy beings, who fall into their clutches, redeem the debt they appear to consider due to them from those absent tourists, who have not come to enjoy all the splendours prepared for them. Since Germany, with its newborn cry for imperial unity, has appeared inclined to turn back again, in new revolutionary spirit, to old feudal times, the Rhenish hotel-keepers seem to think that they ought to appear in the characters of the old robber-knights. This consideration, perfectly personal to a poor tourist, who has lately paid his _löse-geld_ at many a modern robber’s stronghold on the Rhine, brings him round, however, to the question which he has been putting to himself, at every step he has been taking in Germany—“What would revolutionising Germany be at?”