The universities were what the monasteries had been under Charlemagne, the castles under Frederick Barbarossa,—the centres of gravitation for the intellectual and political life of the country. The true nobility of Germany was no longer to be found among the priests,—Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus, Notker Teutonicus; nor among the knights,—Walther von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and their patrons, Frederick II., Hermann von Thüringen, and Leopold of Austria. The intellectual sceptre of Germany was wielded by a new nobility,—a nobility that had risen from the ranks, like the priests and the knights, but which, for a time at least, kept itself from becoming a caste, and from cutting away those roots through which it imbibed its vigor and sustained its strength. It had its castles in the universities, its tournaments in the diets of Worms and Augsburg, and it counted among its members, dukes and peasants, divines and soldiers, lawyers and artists. This was not, indeed, an hereditary nobility, but on that very ground it is a nobility which can never become extinct. The danger, however, which threatens all aristocracies, whether martial, clerical, or municipal, was not averted from the intellectual aristocracy of Germany. The rising spirit of caste deprived the second generation of that power which men like Luther had gained at the beginning of the Reformation. The moral influence of the universities in Germany was great, and it is great at the present day. But it would have been greater and more beneficial if the conceit of caste had not separated the leaders of the nation from the ranks whence they themselves had arisen, and to which alone they owed their position and their influence. It was the same with the priests, who would rather form a hierarchy than be merged in the laity. It was the same with the knights, who would rather form a select society than live among the gentry. Both cut away the ground under their feet; and the Reformers of the sixteenth century fell into the same snare before they were aware of it. We wonder at the eccentricities of the priesthood, at the conceit of the hereditary nobility, at the affectation of majestic stateliness inherent in royalty. But the pedantic display of learning, the disregard of the real wants of the people, the contempt of all knowledge which does not wear the academic garb, show the same foible, the same conceit, the same spirit of caste among those who, from the sixteenth century to the present day, have occupied the most prominent rank in the society of Germany. Professorial knight-errantry still waits for its Cervantes. Nowhere have the objects of learning been so completely sacrificed to the means of learning, nowhere has that Dulcinea,—knowledge for its own sake,—with her dark veil and her barren heart, numbered so many admirers; nowhere have so many windmills been fought, and so many real enemies been left unhurt, as in Germany, particularly during the last two centuries.