Undoubtedly this pressure of convenance was frequently, with the Germans, broken through by characteristic rectitude and firmness. But the stedfast enduring power of will, which we honour as man's highest quality, was then very rare in Germany. It was to be gained by experience and necessity, by the labour and practice of arduous duty; then it broke forth with surprising energy. But this quality was deficient in some manly characteristics. The pressure of a despotic state had continued for a century; it had made the citizen shy, dull, and fainthearted. This frame of mind had been promoted by Pietism. A continual contemplation of their own unworthiness diminished in more finely organized minds the capacity of enjoying themselves heartily, or of giving frank expression to their own nature. The severe training and immoderate exertions of memory of literary men, and their many night watches in close rooms amid the fumes of tobacco, only too often implanted disease. We may gather from many examples how frequently consumption and hypochondria destroyed the life of young scholars. And we find generally among the citizen families of that time, sentimental, irritable, sensitive natures, helpless and feckless in respect of all that was unusual to them. But that was not the worst. Not only the will, but the certainty of their convictions and the feeling of duty were easily extinguished by external influences. Of that quiet self-respect which we look for in a good and highly educated man, little is as yet to be seen. Money and outward honour still exercise too great a power even over the most upright Gellert, who was a pattern to his contemporaries of tender feeling and unselfishness, when a professor at Leipzig, was joyfully surprised that a foreign nobleman from Silesia, whom he did not personally know, but with whom he had once exchanged a few letters, offered his mother a yearly pension of twelve ducats. In his answer the assurance of tears of gratitude did not fail. He never felt a scruple in accepting sums of money from persons unknown to him. And one may venture to maintain that in 1750, throughout the whole of Germany, there was scarcely a man, even among the best, who would have refused an anonymous present.