Breitmann in several ballads is indeed a very literal copy or combination of characteristics of men who really exist or existed, and who had in their lives embraced as many extremes of thought as the Captain. America abounds with Germans, who, having received in their youth a "classical education," have passed through varied adventures, and often present the most startling paradoxes of thought and personal appearance. I have seen bearing a keg a porter who could speak Latin fluently. I have been in a beer-shop kept by a man who was distinguished in the Frankfurt Parliament. I have found a graduate of the University of Munich in a negro minstrel troupe. And while mentioning these as proof that Breitmann, as I have depicted him, is not a contradictory character, I cannot refrain from a word of praise as to the energy and patience with which the German "under a cloud" in America bears his reverses, and works cheerfully and uncomplainingly, until, by sheer perseverance, he, in most cases, conquers fortune. In this respect the Germans, as a race, and I might almost say as individuals, are superior to any others on the American continent. And if I have jested with the German new philosophy, it is with the more seriousness that I here acknowledge the deepest respect for that true practical philosophy of life -- that well-balanced mixture of stoicism and epicurism -- which enables Germans to endure and to ENJOY under circumstances when other men would probably despair. Breitmann is one of the battered types of the men of '48 -- a person whose education more than his heart has in every way led him to entire scepticism or indifference -- and one whose Lutheranism does not go beyond "Wein, Weib, und Gesang." Beneath his unlimited faith in pleasure lie natural shrewdness, an excellent early education, and certain principles of honesty and good fellowship, which are all the more clearly defined from his moral looseness in details which are identified in the Anglo-Saxon mind with total depravity. In such a man, the appreciation of the beautiful in nature may be keen, but it will continually vanish before humour or mere fun; while having no deep root in life or interests in common with the settled Anglo-Saxon citizen, he cannot fail to appear at times to the latter as a near relation to Mephistopheles. But his "mockery" is as accidental and naif as that of Jewish Young Germany is keen and deliberate; and the former differs from the latter as the drollery of Abraham a Santa Clara differs from the brilliant satire of Heine.