_Voluntary Note by me_. I hold this ground to be the strongest in the whole Petition. In the eyes of Herr von Aufhammer, Thiennette's genealogical tree was long since stubbed, disleaved, worm-eaten, and full of millepedes; she was his [Oe]conoma, his Castle-Stewardess, and Legatess _a Latere_ for his domestics; and with her pretensions for an alms-coffer, was threatening in the end to become a burden to him. His indignant wish that she had been provided for with Fixlein's legacy might now be fulfilled. In a word, if Fixlein become Parson, he will have the third ground to thank for it; not at all the mad fourth.... 4. "He had learned with sorrow, that the name of his Shock, which he had purchased from an Emigrant at Leipzig, meant Egidius in German; and that the dog had drawn upon him the displeasure of his Lordship. Far be it from him so to designate the Shock in future; but he would take it as a special grace, if for the dog, which he at present called without any name, his Lordship would be pleased to appoint one himself." _My Voluntary Note_. The dog then, it seems, to which the nobleman has hitherto been godfather, is to receive its name a _second_ time from him!--But how can the famishing gardener's son, whose career never mounted higher than from the school-bench to the school-chair, and who never spoke with polished ladies, except singing, namely in the church, how can he be expected, in fingering such a string, to educe from it any finer tone than the pedantic one? And yet the source of it lies deeper; not the contracted _situation_, but the contracted _eye_, not a favorite science, but a narrow plebeian soul, makes us pedantic,--a soul that cannot _measure_ and _separate_ the _concentric_ circles of human knowledge and activity, that confounds the focus of universal human life, by reason of the focal distance, with every two or three converging rays; and that cannot see all, and tolerate all---- In short, the true Pedant is the Intolerant. The Conrector wrote out his Petition splendidly in five propitious evenings; employed a peculiar ink for the purpose; worked not indeed so long over it as the stupid Manucius over a Latin letter, namely, some months, if Scioppius's word is to be taken; still less so long as another scholar at a Latin epistle, who--truly we have nothing but Morhof's word for it--hatched it during four whole months; inserting his variations, adjectives, feet, with the authorities for his phrases, accurately marked between the lines. Fixlein possessed a more thoroughgoing genius, and had completely mastered the whole enterprise in sixteen days. While sealing, he thought, as we all do, how this cover was the seed-husk of a great entire Future, the rind of many sweet or bitter fruits, the swathing of his whole after life.