But Germany is also a vast MINERY, where thousands are digging in the dark, during the best years of their lives, extracting the most precious literary lore from the masses of rubbish in which it lies concealed. Around the mouths of these mines are always hovering certain birds of prey, of passage, and of furtive propensities, which, under cover of the night, commit depredations on the shining ore that is rescued from its grave by the laborious miner. Among these are the literary cormorant, the gull, the daw, and the magpie, who no sooner get _crammed_ with the German spoils, than they fly off to their roosts and nests to exhibit them as the legitimate produce of their own industry. I have known more than one, two, or three of these daws who, having plumed themselves in German feathers, strutted as proudly as if their habiliments had been of genuine indigenous growth! The German seems to court, and to cultivate LEARNING for the sake of itself, rather than of its attendant advantages. He climbs the rugged steeps of science—wanders over the flowery fields of literature—or explores the dark and mysterious labyrinths of metaphysics—with little hope, and less prospect of reaping more than empty fame,—and that too often posthumous! Yet the German is as modest in the profession, as he is industrious in the pursuit of knowledge. In his patient researches, he is hardly ever led aside to the right or to the left, by ambition, vanity, or avarice. Truth is his object—accuracy, impartiality, and laborious research, are the channels through which he reaches it. Not that he is insensible to honours of all kinds. On the contrary, like the whole of his countrymen, a ribbon, a cross, or a star, is to him not only a symbol of distinction but an object of worship. The German illuminati, whether literary, philosophic, or scientific, immersed in their libraries and laboratories, far removed from the excitement of politics, commerce, arts, or manufactures, not seldom lean to the speculative, rather than to the practical—to the mysterious, rather than to the obvious.—Hence the transcendental dreams and extravagant experiments, which daily rise, like meteors, from this land of ideality and metaphysics, soon to dissolve in air—thin air. Yet these eccentricities are not attributable to peculiarity of education, or idiosyncrasy of constitution; but to those extrinsic circumstances in which the German is placed.