substance: that gilding and trappings should remain when that which they were meant to deck and clothe has departed. So our sloth or our timidity, not seeing that whatever is false must be also bad, maintains in being what once was good long after it has become helpless and hopeless: so now at the close of the eighteenth century, strings of sounding titles were all that was left of the Empire which Charles had founded, and Frederick adorned, and Dante sung. [Sidenote: Feelings of the German people.] The German mind, just beginning to put forth the blossoms of its wondrous literature, turned away in disgust from the spectacle of ceremonious imbecility more than Byzantine. National feeling seemed gone from princes and people alike. Lessing, who did more than any one else to create the German literary spirit, says, 'Of the love of country I have no conception: it appears to me at best a heroic weakness which I am right glad to be without[396].' The Emperor Joseph II writes to his brother of France: 'You must know that the annihilation of German nationality is a necessary leading principle of my policy[397].' There were nevertheless persons who saw how fatal such a system was, lying like a nightmare on the people's soul. Speaking of the union of princes formed by Frederick of Prussia to preserve the existing condition of things, Johannes von Müller writes[398]: 'If the German Union serves for nothing better than to maintain the _status quo_, it is against the eternal order of God, by which neither the physical nor the moral world remains for a moment in the _status quo_, but all is life and motion and progress. To exist without law or justice, without security from arbitrary imposts, doubtful whether we can preserve from day to day our honours, our liberties, our rights, our lives, helpless before superior force, without a beneficial connexion between our states, without a national spirit at all, this is the _status quo_ of our nation. And it was this that the Union was meant to confirm. If it be this and nothing more, then bethink you how when Israel saw that Rehoboam would not hearken, the people gave answer to the king and spake, "What portion have we in David, or what inheritance in the son of Jesse? to your tents, O Israel: David, see to thine own house." See then to your own houses, ye princes.' Nevertheless, though the Empire stood like a corpse brought forth from some Egyptian sepulchre, ready to crumble at a touch, there seemed no reason why it should not stand so for centuries more. Fate was kind, and slew it in the light. FOOTNOTES: [376] _De Ratione Status in Imperio nostro Romano-Germanico_.