The war had inflicted much injury on the artisan, and it was first in domestic life that he began to recover from the effects of it. The weaker minds withdrew entirely into their homes, for there was little satisfaction in public life, and their means of defence were diminished. There was now peace, and the old gates of the battered city walls grated on their hinges, but trivial quarrels distracted the council-table, and envious tittle-tattle and malignant calumny embittered every hour of the year to those stronger minds that exerted themselves for the public good. A morbid terror of publicity prevailed. When in the beginning of the eighteenth century the first weekly advertisers sprang up, and the Council of Frankfort-on-Main conceded to the undertakers of it, a weekly list of baptisms, marriages, and deaths, there was a general burst of displeasure; it was considered insupportable that such private concerns should be made public. So completely had the German become a private character. There were few cities then in Germany on whose social life we can dwell with satisfaction. Hamburg is perhaps the best specimen that can be given. Even there war and its consequences had caused great devastation, but the fresh air that blew from the wide ocean through the streets of the honest citizens of a free town, soon invigorated their energies. Their self-government, and position as a small state in union with foreign powers, preserved their community from extreme narrow-mindedness, and it appears that in the period of laxity and weakness that followed the Thirty years' war, they became by their energetic conduct the principal gainers. Land traffic with the interior of Germany, as also nautical commerce across the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean, recovered their elasticity soon after the termination of the war. Hamburg envoys and agents negotiated with the States-general, and at the court of Cromwell. The Hamburgers possessed not only a merchant fleet, but also a small navy. Their two frigates were, more than once, a terror to the pirates of the Mediterranean and of the German Ocean. They convoyed, now Greenland and Archangel navigators, now great fleets of from forty to fifty merchantmen, to Oporto, Lisbon, Cadiz, Malta, and Leghorn, in short, wherever there were Hamburg settlements.