The duel is one of the few institutions of the Middle Ages which have come down to our times. Club-law, shaken to its foundation by the unceasing exertions of the German Emperors, must give way before a pliant and cunningly calculating policy. We see only in the duel its still surviving sparks, and this we see more commonly resorted to amongst students, than amongst any other class, any other corporate body; and, moreover, we find the German students making use of it to do themselves justice more frequently than all others, and how can we wonder at it? Where a great number of young men live a long time together, there, ever and anon, will certainly disagreements arise. This we see to be the case every where, and it must the oftener arise amongst students, who, streaming from so many different places, with so many different views of things, which early education has implanted in each mind, many of them, moreover, placed high by birth, now find themselves placed as it were on a level, that they may enter into the necessary intercourse. "There is no love without strife," says an old proverb, and accordingly this gathering together, this dividing and coalescing into separate companies, which takes place more in the German universities than in those of any other country, must inevitably lead to more frequent disputes. Moreover, the free, developement of all physical and intellectual powers, in which the German students especially delight, must more easily occasion differences than is the case amongst other classes of society; and therefore we find the duel even more frequent amongst them than amongst the military class. But if it enjoy a legal toleration in the military class, as being considered to a certain degree necessary, we must admit that amongst students, where it is punished by the laws, it wards off worse things, and as an unavoidable evil could not be very easily or speedily annihilated. Can we blame very severely rash and impetuous youth, which, in the feeling of its strength fancies that it can fight out and achieve any thing--which has not yet learnt to accommodate itself to the notions of strangers and the opinions of others--if it betake itself to other weapons than well-considered words and the discreet pen? And regarded from this point of view, the duel appears an evil small in comparison, and much to be preferred to the cudgel to which the _Handwerksburschen_, the journeymen artisans, addict themselves; and from which, we suppose, they have acquired the appellation of Knoten, which is contemptuously given them--as people who, to settle their quarrels, have recourse to a knotty stick--_Knotenstock_. It is very rare that a student degrades himself by the use of the cudgel, and this offence would be even more strongly punished by the laws, while it would be visited by the students' own court of honour with the _Verruf_, or Bann. Nor must we forget that in the interval between the