influence felt abroad. At the close of the war, the Protestants received indeed the same rights as the Roman Catholics; but the nation was so completely demoralized that it hardly cared for the liberties guaranteed by the treaty of Westphalia. The physical and moral vigor of the nation was broken. The population of Germany is said to have been reduced by one half. Thousands of villages and towns had been burnt to the ground. The schools, the churches, the universities, were deserted. A whole generation had grown up during the war, particularly among the lower classes, with no education at all. The merchants of Germany, who formerly, as Æneas Sylvius said, lived more handsomely than the Kings of Scotland, were reduced to small traders. The Hansa was broken up. Holland, England, and Sweden had taken the wind out of her sails. In the Eastern provinces, commerce was suspended by the inroads of the Turks; whilst the discovery of America, and of the new passage to the East Indies, had reduced the importance of the mercantile navy of Germany and Italy in the Mediterranean. Where there was any national feeling left, it was a feeling of shame and despair, and the Emperor and the small princes of Germany might have governed even more selfishly than they did, without rousing opposition among the people. What can we expect of the literature of such times? Popular poetry preserved some of its indestructible charms. The Meistersänger went on composing according to the rules of their guilds, but we look in vain for the raciness and honest simplicity of Hans Sachs. Some of the professors wrote plays in the style of Terence, or after English models, and fables became fashionable in the style of Phædrus. But there was no trace anywhere of originality, truth, taste, or feeling, except in that branch which, like the palm-tree, thrives best in the desert,—sacred poetry. Paul Gerhard is still without an equal as a poet of sacred songs; and many of the best hymns which are heard in the Protestant churches of Germany date from the seventeenth century. Soon, however, this class of poetry also degenerated on one side into dry theological phraseology, on the other into sentimental and almost erotic affectation.