But to return to the clergy. While the monasteries and nunneries are going to the ground in superstition-saturated Spain; while eager workmen are demolishing the last hiding-places of monkery, and letting the daylight into places that have well kept the frightful secrets of three hundred years, and turning the ancient cloister demesne into public parks and pleasure-grounds,--the Romish priesthood here, in free Bavaria, seem to imagine that they cannot only resist the progress of events, but that they can actually bring back the owlish twilight of the Middle Ages. The reactionary party in Bavaria has, in some of the provinces, a strong majority; and its supporters and newspapers are belligerent and aggressive. A few words about the politics of Bavaria will give you a clew to the general politics of the country. The reader of the little newspapers here in Munich finds evidence of at least three parties. There is first the radical. Its members sincerely desire a united Germany, and, of course, are friendly to Prussia, hate Napoleon, have little confidence in the Hapsburgs, like to read of uneasiness in Paris, and hail any movement that overthrows tradition and the prescriptive right of classes. If its members are Catholic, they are very mildly so; if they are Protestant, they are not enough so to harm them; and, in short, if their religious opinions are not as deep as a well, they are certainly broader than a church door. They are the party of free inquiry, liberal thought, and progress. Akin to them are what may be called the conservative liberals, the majority of whom may be Catholics in profession, but are most likely rationalists in fact; and with this party the king naturally affiliates, taking his music devoutly every Sunday morning in the Allerheiligenkirche, attached to the Residenz, and getting his religion out of Wagner; for, progressive as the youthful king is, he cannot be supposed to long for a unity which would wheel his throne off into the limbo of phantoms. The conservative liberals, therefore, while laboring for thorough internal reforms, look with little delight on the increasing strength of Prussia, and sympathize with the present liberal tendencies of Austria. Opposed to both these parties is the ultramontane, the head of which is the Romish hierarchy, and the body of which is the inert mass of ignorant peasantry, over whom the influence of the clergy seems little shaken by any of the modern moral earthquakes. Indeed I doubt if any new ideas will ever penetrate a class of peasants who still adhere to styles of costume that must have been ancient when the Turks threatened Vienna, which would be highly picturesque if they were not painfully ugly, and arrayed in which their possessors walk about in the broad light of these latter days, with entire unconsciousness that they do not belong to this age, and that their appearance is as much of an anachronism as if the figures should step out of Holbein's