Heine points out how carefully Menzel has chosen the time for making his accusations, a time when the leaders of the movement were either in exile, or silent, or in safe keeping behind bolts and bars. He exposes Menzel's hypocrisy, showing how, as long as he was connected with Gutzkow, he looked on silently, though he knew Christianity to be in peril of its life. He is quite ready to give him credit for "a certain physical morality"--for a man can be virtuous alone, but to be vicious he must have a companion. Herr Menzel's personal appearance stands him in good stead when he is desirous to flee from vice. Heine has far too high an opinion of the good taste of vice to be able to believe that it would run after a Menzel. Poor Goethe was not so fortunately gifted in this particular. Of Menzel's political opinions Heine is afraid to speak for political reasons. Nor can he say what he thinks of his private life (as if by a printer's error _Privatschelmenleben_ is substituted for _Privatmenschenleben_) in the first instance for want of space. Never did Heine write anything at once so insulting and so crushing. And how did matters stand with Gutzkow, who at the early age of twenty-four had become a kind of centre of literary events, and upon whom "the Goliath of the Philistine army" had fallen? For a moment he was astonished and cast down. It was his first instructive experience of life. His sin was that he had expressed his feelings naïvely and honestly in a second-rate novel, and its result was that he now found himself denounced as a plague of society, mocked at by his enemies, forsaken and disowned by his friends. With perfect calm he heard himself compared to the men who had prepared for the enormities perpetrated at Minister under Jan van Leyden--division of property, marriage with twelve wives, &c. He was inexperienced enough to look forward to the legal proceedings against him with expectations of victory, and when he was arrested at Mannheim, he went to prison with a feeling of relief. In prison he did not hear the yelling of the press; he heard nothing but the squeaking of the mice that ran over his bed. He could lead a peaceful life, a life of uninterrupted, quiet production. He wrote his novel _Seraphine_ and a work entitled _Philosophic der That und des Ereignisses_ ("Philosophy of Action and Event"), a kind of criticism of Hegel's _Philosophy of History_. When he came out of prison he took up his life-work again with firm determination, but for a time wrote anonymously and expressed himself more cautiously.