Even after the Peace of Pressburg the long agony of the Imperial free city was continued, till in 1806 by a decree of Napoleon, in the 17th article of the Rheinbund Act, it was laid down that "the town and territory of Nuremberg be united to Bavaria with full sovereignty and possession." On the 6th of August 1806, Emperor Francis abdicated, and the Holy Roman Empire, "which was a grand object once, but had gone about in a superannuated and plainly crazy state for some centuries back, was at last put out of pain and allowed to cease from the world." Since then the story of Nuremberg is swallowed up in the history of United Germany. She has shared and still shares in the growing prosperity of the new Empire. The first railway in Germany was opened in 1835 between Nuremberg and Fürth. Her hops, her toys, her cakes, her railway-carriages, her lead-pencils, are they not known the world over? New buildings have sprung up on every side of her: the suburbs are themselves great manufacturing towns. The population has grown to 170,000. These are all things on which she may most sincerely be congratulated; but whatever her prosperity in the present or the future, her golden age, we feel, is in the past. She is Albert Durer's and Hans Sachs' city. * * * * * We began by hinting that the atmosphere of Nuremberg is mediæval, that of a city of legend. We will close this account of her history with the brief narration of her last, her nineteenth century myth. For we cannot pass over in silence the curious case of Kaspar Hauser. At a time when Europe was still dripping from the douche of sentimentality in which it had been bathed by the sorrows of Werther and the romanticism of Byron, Kaspar Hauser appeared suddenly in Nuremberg. His astonishing story achieved a European celebrity. The history of this impostor has recently been placed once more before the public by the Duchess of Cleveland,[22] with the object of clearing her father from imputations which would have been ridiculous if they had not been so impudent. Charity, and the facts of the case, enable us to add with regard to Kaspar himself, that if he was an impostor he was also half a lunatic; for we can trace in the records of his career, among other symptoms of a diseased brain, the mania of persecution, an over acute and perverted sense of smell, a restless love of notoriety, and an ineradicable habit of lying. On Easter Monday, May 1828, a lad of seventeen, dressed like a countryman, appeared outside the Neue Thor, and asked, in the low Bavarian dialect, his way to the Neue Thor Strasse. He had with him two letters in one envelope addressed to "The Captain of the 4th Squadron of the Schmolischer Regiment, Neue Thor Strasse, Nuremberg." They ran as follows, in handwriting exactly similar to Kaspar's:--