Everywhere throughout Germany in the worst times after the war, there were thousands who were fortified by the feeling that they also, like their fathers and neighbours, had resisted armed conversion to the death. In the converted Austrian territories of the Emperor, this feeling was rare. For almost a century and a half the Bohemian and German races vegetated in a dreary dream life. The Bohemian countryman hung the various saints of the restored church by the side of his pictures of Huss and Zisko, but he kept a holy lamp burning before the old heretic; the citizen of Vienna and Olmutz accustomed himself to speak of the Empire and Germany as of a foreign land; he accommodated himself to Hungarians, Italians, and Croats, but at the same time he remained a stranger in the new state in which he was now domiciled. Little did he care for the categorical imperative, imposed by the new worldly wisdom; later he learned that Schiller was a German poet. Only then did a new spring begin for the Germans, in which freedom of mind and beauty of soul were sought for as the highest aim of earthly life; when the new study of antiquity inspired them with enthusiasm, when the genius of Goethe irradiated the court of Weimar, then sounded from dormant Austria, the deepest and most mysterious of arts, a fullness of melody. There also the spirit of the people had found touching expression in Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. CHAPTER VII. ROGUES AND ADVENTURERS. The war had fearfully loosened the joints of burgher society. The old orderly and disciplined character of Germans appeared almost lost. Countless was the number of unfortunates who having lost house and farm, maintenance and family, wandered homeless through inhospitable foreign countries; and not less numerous were the troops of reprobates who had habituated themselves to live by fraud, extortion, and robbery. Excitement had become a necessity to the whole living race, for thirty years the vagrant rabble of all Europe had chosen Germany as their head-quarters. Thus it happened that after the peace the doings of the fortune hunters, adventurers, and rogues increased to an extraordinary extent. A contrast of weakness and roughness is, in the following century, a special characteristic of the needy, careworn family life, into which the spirit of the German people had contracted itself. Some particulars of this wild life will be here related, which will denote the gradual changes it underwent. For like the German devils, the children of the devil have also their history, and their race is more ancient than the Christian faith.