The freedom-loving group had, of course, during the wars with Napoleon, shared the Romanticists' hatred of France. But when their sympathies came to take the shape of wishes and demands (for liberty of the press, constitutional government, the franchise, &c), the hatred of France inevitably evaporated. And the stronger the reaction became, the more keenly were all eyes turned to that neighbouring country which possessed Parliamentary government. The heroes of French Liberalism were soon men of great consequence in the estimation of the German Liberals; indeed at a distance they seemed of more consequence than they did at home. In Germany, after the victory over Napoleon, as after the great defeat, quietness was the first duty of the citizen.[3] All was obedience and silence. And the result was what it usually is when a highly gifted but unenergetic people are incapable of throwing off a yoke; its pressure generated self-contempt, and the self-contempt a kind of desperate wit, of chronic "gallows-humour"; the better sort developed a real passion for solacing themselves with derision of their own impotence. The observation of existing conditions gave constantly recurring occasion for irony directed against themselves--against visionary Romanticism, the spirit of patience and submission in the domain of politics, orthodoxy and pietism in the domain of religion. Caricature-like developments of political life, religion, and poetry incited to sarcasm, that sometimes ruthlessly wounded patriotic feeling, sometimes assumed a frivolous tone which, taken in connection with the French leanings of Liberalism, was, or inevitably seemed to be, more French than German. [1] Haym: _Hegel und seine Zeit_, p. 365; R. Prutz: _Vorlesungen über die deutsche Litteratur der Gegenwart,_ p. 259. [2] Treitschke: _Deutsche Geschichte_, iii. 686. [3] "_Die erste Bürgerpflicht ist Ruhe,_" These words occur in an official notice posted in the streets of Berlin after the defeat of Jena. [Illustration: CHAMISSO] III SPIRIT OF THE OPPOSITION