whose rule had been, as is well known, popular in the Rhine provinces, where he passed his youth; with a passionate admiration for the great French Emperor, with a passionate contempt for the sovereigns who had overthrown him, for their agents, and for their policy,--Heinrich Heine was in 1830 in no humor for any such gradual process of liberation from the old order of things as that which Goethe had followed. His counsel was for open war. Taking that terrible modern weapon, the pen, in his hand, he passed the remainder of his life in one fierce battle. What was that battle? the reader will ask. It was a life and death battle with Philistinism. _Philistinism!_[140]--we have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing. At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms;[141] and here, at the very headquarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism. The French have adopted the term _épicier_ (grocer), to designate the sort of being whom the Germans designate by the Philistine; but the French term--besides that it casts a slur upon a respectable class, composed of living and susceptible members, while the original Philistines are dead and buried long ago--is really, I think, in itself much less apt and expressive than the German term. Efforts have been made to obtain in English some term equivalent to _Philister_ or _épicier_; Mr. Carlyle has made several such efforts: "respectability with its thousand gigs,"[142] he says;--well, the occupant of every one of these gigs is, Mr. Carlyle means, a Philistine. However, the word _respectable_ is far too valuable a word to be thus perverted from its proper meaning; if the English are ever to have a word for the thing we are speaking of,--and so prodigious are the changes which the modern spirit is introducing, that even we English shall perhaps one day come to want such a word,--I think we had much better take the term _Philistine_ itself.