Maximilian of Bavaria, a prince whose amiable manners and character rendered him universally beloved, expired in 1825. His son, Louis, the foe to French despotism, a German patriot and a zealous patron of the arts, declared himself, on his coronation, the warm and sincere upholder of the constitutional principle and excited general enthusiasm. His first measures on assuming the government were the reduction of the royal household and of the army with a view to the relief of the country from the heavy imposts, the removal of the university of Landshut to Munich, and the enrichment on an extensive scale of the institutions of art. The union of the galleries of Düsseldorf and Mannheim with that of Munich, the collection of valuable antiques and pictures, for instance, that of the old German paintings collected by the brothers Boisserée in Cologne during the French usurpation, the academy of painting under the direction of the celebrated Cornelius, the new public buildings raised by Klenze, among which the Glyptothek, the Pinakothek, the great Königsbau or royal residence, the Ludwigschurch, the Auerchurch, the Arcades, etc., may be more particularly designated, rendered Munich the centre of German art. This sovereign also founded at Ratisbon the Walhalla, a building destined for the reception of the busts of all the celebrated men to whom Germany has given birth. The predilection of this royal amateur for classic antiquity excited within his bosom the warmest sympathy with the fate of the modern Greeks, then in open insurrection against their Turkish oppressors, and whom he alone, among all the princes of Germany, aided in the hour of their extremest need.--With the same spirit that dictated his poems, in which he so repeatedly lamented the want of unity in Germany, he was the first to propose the union of her material interests. Germany unhappily resembled, and indeed immediately after the war of liberation, as De Pradt, the French writer, maliciously observed, even in a mercantile point of view, a menagerie whose inhabitants watched each other through a grating. Vainly had the commercial class of Frankfort on the Maine presented a petition, in 1819, to the confederation, praying for free trade, for the fulfilment of the nineteenth article of the federal act. Their well-grounded complaint remained unheard. The non-fulfilment of the treaty relating to the free navigation of the Rhine to the sea was most deeply felt. In the first treaty concluded at Paris, the royal dignity and the extension of the Dutch territory had been generously granted to the king of the Netherlands under the express proviso of the free navigation of the Rhine to the sea. The papers relating to this transaction had been drawn up in French, and the ungrateful Dutch perfidiously gave the words "jusqu' à la mer" their most literal construction, merely "as far as the sea," and as the French, moreover, possessed a voice in the matter on account of the Upper Rhine, and the