“Ah, the People, this poor King in tatters,” wrote Heine from Paris in 1848, “has fallen on flatterers far more shameless, as they swing their censers around his head, than the courtiers of Byzantium or Versailles. These court lackeys of the People incessantly vaunt its virtues and excellences, crying aloud: ‘How beautiful is the People! how good is the People! how intelligent is the People!’ No, you lie. The People is not beautiful; on the contrary, it is very ugly. But its ugliness is due to its dirt, and will vanish with public baths for the free ablutions of his Majesty. A piece of soap, too, will do no harm; and we shall then see a People in the beauty of cleanliness--a washen People. The People whose goodness is thus magnified is not good at all. It is often as bad as other potentates. But its baseness flows from hunger. When once it has well eaten and drunk, it will smile, gracious and well-favoured as the rest. Nor is his Majesty over-intelligent. He is possibly stupider than the others--stupid with the bestiality of his minions; he will only love or heed the speakers, or howlers, of the jargon of his passions: he hates every brave soul that converses in the speech of reason, and that would ennoble and enlighten him.” Heine was leading “Young Germany.” A few years earlier, Disraeli was leading “Young England.” The contrast between the atmosphere of the two countries deserves a passing comment. “Young England” aimed at betterment in that very feudal spirit which the poet--the “unfrocked Romantic”--by turns breathed and spurned. In Germany the weird medley of the “Romantic School” had for fifty years been striving to rewaken the myths, the chivalry, the wistfulness of the past. But its direct influences were merely æsthetic, and mainly sentimental; while they eventually became actually anæmic--a vague reverie of mediæval moonlight and pallid ghosts. The uprooting French Revolution had swept away both castle and cobwebs, and in Germany the “folk-song” was the sole antiquity to which this Romantic attachment could cling, and by which it could touch the patriotism of a disunited people. But in England, Scott’s “buff-jerkin” revival, at which Carlyle so unjustly scoffed, was more than a literary sport; it had already braced the nation with the fresh breeze of an invigorating tradition. It brought back and home the inheritance of a real throne and a real nobility, of chivalry, of daring, and of prowess; it reminded the people that the humblest was once protected by the highest; and though it perhaps burked or omitted much that disgraced the age of the tournament, the foray, and the cloister, it quickened its best, its most hopeful and most cheerful elements. It took the dry bones from their mouldering tomb and put the breath of life, the wholesome laughter of humour, and the brightness of beauty into and about their scattered fragments; whereas in Germany the Romantics rather embalmed and buried the living