I was going to have inserted in the Magazine of Literature, that I needed _Herrnschmidt's osculologia_[64] for my (learned) labors,--that is for this Chapter. I wanted to find out from it, how in Herrnschmidt's times they managed with women. In Jean Paul's times, they treat them miserably, that is to say in romances. Only an Englishman can portray excellent women. In the hands of most German romance-founders, the women turn out men, the coquettes w----, the statues lumps, the flower-pieces kitchen-pieces. That the fault lies more with the artists than with the models, not only the models themselves know, but also the Mining-Superintendent, even from the fact, that the female readers of romances are all even more romantic than the heroines of them,--more refined and reserved. The Mining-Superintendent will here--without any design of having eight distinguished women in Mayence bear him to the grave, as they did the women's minstrel and meister-singer, Henry Frauenlob--swear a printed oath (or simply _swear_ in print) that he has found most of his contemporaries better than the good, open, but empty and rough head of the author of the Alcibiades and Nordenschild[65] can draw them. In fact, if women did not forgive men everything, even authors, (and in truth they do it seventy times a day, and offer the other cheek, when one has been offended by a kiss,) then no circulating-library keeper could explain how it is that human beings, whose head nevertheless is heavier, whose pineal gland is smaller, and who have six more annular cartilages to the windpipe,--that is, in all, twenty, probably for the sake of their more speaking,--whose breast-bone is shorter, and whose breast-bones are softer than men's,--how such human beings of the female sex can still send their maid or footman to a circulating library with the commission: "A romance of chivalry for my mademoiselle!" My colleagues of the quill--in reference to women I am, according to miners' language, one of the _feather_,[66] not of _fire_ nor of _leather_--are elected for the education of female readers, as, according to Lessing, the Jews were for the education of the nations, for the simple reason that they are ruder than their pupils. Every woman is finer than her station. She gains more by culture than the man. The female angels (but so also the female devils) are kept only in the highest and finest human drawers; they are butterflies, on whom the velvet-wing between two rough man's-fingers becomes a naked, skinny flap; they are tulips, whose colored leaves a single grasp of fate rubs down into a smutty leather.---- I bring forward all this, in order that Herr Kotzebue and the shameless Poets'-corner in Jena[67] and the whole romantic crew may not take it ill of my Clotilda that she imitates more her own sex than the aforesaid tribe, and so much the more, as she can allege in her defence, that she has not yet read this.