In the history of Germany it was her two great intellectual liberators, Luther and Lessing, to whom Heine looked up with the most unqualified love and reverence. By his later vindication of the rights of the spirit, not less than by his earlier fight for religious and political progress, he may be said to have earned for himself a place below, indeed, but not so very far below, those hearty and sound-cored iconoclasts. II. To reach the root of the man's nature we must glance at the chief facts of his life. He was born at Düsseldorf on the Rhine, then occupied by the French, probably on the 13th of December 1799.[1] He came, by both parents, of that Jewish race which is, as he said once, the dough whereof gods are kneaded. The family of his mother, Betty van Geldern, had come from Holland a century earlier; Betty herself received an excellent education; she shared the studies of her brother, who became a physician of repute; she spoke and read English and French; her favourite books were Rousseau's _Emile_ and Goethe's elegies. Some letters written during her twenty-fourth year reveal a frank, brave and sweet nature; she was a bright, attractive little person, and had many wooers. In the summer of 1796 Samson Heine, bearing a letter of introduction, entered the house of the Van Gelderns. He was the son of a Jewish merchant settled in Hanover, and he had just made a campaign in Flanders and Brabant, in the capacity of commissary with the rank of officer, under Prince Ernest of Cumberland. He was a large and handsome man, with soft blond hair and beautiful hands; there was something about him, said his son, a little characterless and feminine. After a brief courtship he married Betty and settled at Düsseldorf as an agent for English velveteens. Harry (so he was named after an Englishman) was the first child. While from his rather weak and romantic father came whatever was loose and unbalanced in Heine's temperature, it was his mother, with her strong and healthy nature, well developed both intellectually and emotionally, who, as he himself said, played the chief part in the history of his evolution.