in order, by the distorted figure therein which reminds us of our desecration, to be forever warned away from the vice. Hence whole chapters, the dean, the sub-senior, the junior canons, &c., often set vessels full of wine or beer before them, and lift them to their eyes, and in this _metamorphotic_ or caricaturing glass, which, by shaking, distorts still more the distorted features, contemplate themselves, according to the philosopher's advice, a good long while. I ask whether people who peer so deeply into the glass can love drinking?-- It does not, however, follow from this, that I deny the Great-Viennese a resemblance to the Flachsenfingeners, in such traits as do honor. Thus, for example, I must gladly allow a similarity of the former to the latter in this respect, that they, neither of them, are ever down with the disease of poetry or enthusiasm or sentimentalism,--which are all one. Victor would make this eulogy sound in his language somewhat thus: "The Viennese authors (even the best of them, only Denis and hardly three others excepted) give the reader no wings to bear him up over the whole world of the actual by that nobility of soul, by that contempt of the earth, by that reverence for old virtue and freedom and the higher love, wherein other German geniuses shine as in holy rays."[217] And he would refer for proof to the "Vienna Sketches," to "Faustin,"[218] to Blumauer,[219] and to the "Vienna Almanac of the Muses." This reproach even a Viennese would accept and turn to his credit, by asking us whether we have to show (like him) a "Musen-Almanach," with a sediment of filth, whereupon one might write, "With approbation of the brothel."--This feeling of literary difference compelled even a Nicolai,--otherwise no special _amoroso_ of the Vienna authors,--in his "Universal German Library," to build up for them a separate side-box, although he throws writers of all other German circles together into _one parterre_, or pit. In like manner have I seen in Bavaria, on the gallows, beside the usual post for the three Christian fellow-confessors, a special schismatic cross-beam attached, to which only the Jew tribe were strung up.