Laube makes his début in literature as a disciple of Heine. His _Reisenovellen_, a long series of volumes, are the direct offspring of the _Reisebilder_. But along with the influence of Heine we trace that of Heinse. From Heine Laube takes liveliness and ingenuity of style, and also to a certain extent the personal coxcombry by which we are sometimes very unpleasantly affected; but it is from Wilhelm Heinse, for whom he had an extreme admiration, and whose works he edited, that he derives the undisguised sensualism which displays itself in a positive cult of woman's outward charms constantly and loudly proclaimed. In Heinse's case this worship of female form and colouring, this adoration of the fleshly, is more primitive, more naïvely Bacchanalian, more sincerely religious, than in Laube's. Laube at times offends by coarseness, at times by an almost personal boastfulness of woman-killing qualities, and at times it is too perceptible that he is writing for the purpose of annoying his respectable neighbours. When, in his old age, he began to republish his youthful works, the new generation were astounded by the breaches of good taste which youthful readers some forty years before had admired, and many assented to the severe judgment which had lately been passed on him by Emil Kuh in the chapter on Young Germany contained in his book on Hebbel. But it is unfair to allow a little coarseness and want of taste here and there to keep us from estimating Laube's work in its integrity. In the _Reisenovellen_, in spite of the off-hand way in which they are written, there is little originality. At the very beginning, in the division entitled _Leipzig_, with its French sympathies and its reverence of Napoleon, there is too strong a suggestion of the _Reisebilder_. Laube, like Heine, in his childhood saw the great Emperor; so he gives us to understand, but in such an uncertain manner that we are left in doubt as to whether it was in a dream or in reality; and Laube, too, has--in the person of Gardy the dragoon--his drummer Legrand. Those who wish to get a real, full impression of what Laube was as a young man, ought to read his novel, _Das junge Europa_ (4 vols. 1833-37). A whole, long stage of his development is placed clearly before us in this now pardonably forgotten book, which retains its interest only for the historian. Its three parts--the Poets, The Soldiers, The Citizens--are three works differing very much from each other in kind and in quality.