O ye four men of one heart, press my forlorn Victor's to yours warmly, and make the good youth glad only for one evening!... I myself have verily been so, since the paschal Exodus from the Flachsenfingen Egypt: I will therefore make the twenty-eighth chapter as long as the watering-village itself is. A weightiness will thereby be imparted to my work with true critics,--but with postmasters, too, who, when I despatch it to the bookstore, will draw something considerable from me for their weighing.... But shall an author be so shabby as to abridge his sentiments, for the sake of postage, merely because a post-office clerk weighs them more according to his own than the postal rates? And am I not encouraged to the opposite course--that of protracting my emotions--by the electoral, princely, and city-benches in Ratisbon, inasmuch as the said benches by an imperial recess allow me a deduction of two thirds of my postage for printed matter, in order, as they hope, to give encouragement to literature and to sentiment? The noble Evangelist, to be sure, was also up there among the rest,--he and Joachime having politely escorted the maid of honor to the house of her parents;--but here in the _country_, where there are fewer moral weeds than in _cities_ (just as there are fewer botanical in _fields_ than in _gardens_), and where one enjoys pleasures without _maîtres de déplaisirs_,--here where in Victor love of country appeased the longing for all other love,--no one could be unhappy but he who deserved to be. Mat disappeared there like a toad among tulips. Victor would have loved the English, even without the blood-relationship of nationality, and would have given a bad name to the Dutch, even with that relation; to this is to be ascribed his inconsiderate speech, that these nations pictured themselves in their tobacco-pipes, inasmuch as the English ones had _upright_ heads and the Belgian _hanging_ ones. All three were of the opposition party, and lost the coldness of their blood at the ice-coldness of Pitt's. The correspondent of the Dog-Days does not write me, whether it was because the Minister had offended them,--or whether they took a nearer interest in the frightful judgment-day and resurrection of the dead in France, where the sun broods at once over Phœnix-ashes and crocodile's eggs,--or what the reason was. In fact he reports to me nothing further about them than their names, namely, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar,[34] which were the names of the three holy kings from the East.