But still more repugnant to him was a life without all greatness, with equality in mediocrity as its religion, and hatred to genius, to inquiring minds, to those who openly discard Nazarene asceticism, as its only real morality. And equally repugnant to him was society as he knew it, dominated by an unintellectual clergy and an unrefined aristocracy, and society as he foresaw it, composed of emancipated slave souls, who had only exchanged the servility which was their instinct for free indulgence in the envy which lay at the root of all their morality. He certainly took part with those who rose in revolution against Louis XVI., that worthy locksmith who became a king. But he as certainly took part with Cæsar against Brutus, that dunce of a usurer, who could do nothing but stick a knife into a great man. Heine imagined himself to be a monarchist; he called himself so from sincere conviction, because he was a Cæsarian, and had not the word to express it. He imagined himself to be a democrat, and called himself so; because he was born a plebeian, hated all unjust privileges of birth, and felt himself in eternal opposition to the squirearchy and the clergy. But in his inmost soul he was consistent. The apparent contradiction in his political sympathies and tendencies arose from the fact that he loved greatness and beauty as truly as he loved liberty, and that he was not prepared to sacrifice the highest development of humanity on the altar of unreal equality and real mediocrity. [1] If I ever get hold of thee, thou ugly bird, I will pluck out thy feathers and cut off thy claws, perch thee high in air on a pole, and call the archers of the Rhineland to the merry shooting-match. [2] K. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: _Preussen und Frankreich zur Zeit der Julirevolution_, p. 25, &c. [3] Haym: _Hegel und seine Zeit_. [5] The German will ever treat royalty with respect. 'Tis in a carriage of state, drawn by six horses with sable plumes and trappings--on the box a weeping coachman with crape-bound whip--that the German monarch will be driven to the place of execution, and there most submissively guillotined. [6] At times the fancy takes me to set sail for America, that great liberty-stable, where the equality-bumpkins congregate.... XII HEINE