I assure the readers that I take the field here only against their wives and sisters; for among readers of our sex stout-hearted spectators of æsthetic woes have never been wholly wanting, and still less than among the vulgar themselves; and least of all would I have the appearance of disputing the great majority of business-people, reviewers, criminal-lawyers, and Dutchmen, the possession of great composure during the reading of sad crape-clad scenes, which I and others give to the press. Much rather do I fondly persuade myself that--if there ever was hope of the like--it is precisely now, when the German promises to put on that Belgian stoicism, that noble insensibility, which so becomes him, and through which he is made bullet- and blade-proof against Melpomene's dagger, and goes through Dante's hell, as Christ did through the real one, without suffering. We never, to be sure, had the sensibility of the French, and their Racine would never have been for us anything more than a prince's jester; but we are now, if an author does not absolutely push the matter too far and bring in too many battle-fields, and cups of rat-poison, and gallows-trees,--for that takes hold of us,--but if he only half good-humoredly trots along--I seem really to see him at this moment riding--on a mourning-steed, and shakes with one hand a death-bell, and with the other swings (ah, woe!) a funeral-marshal's baton; or if, finally, he only delineates the invisible, stanched gashes of the tenderer, more delicate soul;--then are we now already in a condition to maintain our merry humor, and to show what a German can endure. People of more moderate force _sleep_ at least, so as not to _suffer_ over a Goethe's _Iphigenia_, because sleep sets sufferers right; or we absolutely forget such elegies, because, according to Plattner, we have no memory for sorrows, and because oblivion--as a prince wrote--is the only remedy for sorrows; or Heaven sends us, as after sorrow joy, after a Messiad (of which a good travesty were to be desired for us) a Blumauer's parody, over which we can easily forget the preceding epopee. W. Women.--Ye sweet, soft spring flowers and angel shoots by the side of us hard winter-cabbage-stumps, I have indeed already, under the former letter, remembered you and your tenderness in contrast to the German _immeltableness_! What shall I further say, except that, when you are good, you are so in the highest degree, and that you and the Cornwall tin have one and the same kind of stamp,--namely, the figure of an angel? X (see I K S).--Y (see I).--Z (see T S). Tz.