Our mode of living is become so simple, and all our customs so little mysterious; our cities are, for the most part, so small, the land so open; all is so simply true, that a man who is desirous to write a German romance, hardly knows how he is to bring the people together, or to lay his plot. Then, as the mothers now in Germany suckle their own children, there is an end of all exchanging them, and a fountain of emotion is thus stopped, that is not to be purchased with money. If I would persuade a maiden to come out in man's clothes, that is immediately discovered, and the servants betray it, before she can get out of the house; and besides, our ladies are educated in such housewifely notions that they have not the heart in them to do any thing of the kind. No, to sit fine by mamma, to cook and to sew, and to become themselves cooks and sewing mothers, that is their business. It is undoubtedly very convenient for them, but it's a shame to the Fatherland, and an invincible obstacle to the romance writer. In England, people think that if two persons of the same sex sleep in the same room, a fever is unavoidable, on which account the people in one house are by night, for the most part separated, and a writer has only to take care that he sets open the house-door, and he can let who he will into the house, and need not fear that any body will awake sooner than he would have them. Furthermore, in England the chimneys are not merely the channels of smoke, but the especial windpipes of the chambers, and afford at the same time such an excellent way to come down into any room of the house, at once and unheard, that I have often been told that he who had once gone up and down a chimney would prefer it to a staircase. In Germany a lover would make a pretty journey if he were to come down a chimney! Yes, if he had a mind to fall into a fire-hearth, or into a wash-kettle with lye, or into an anti-chamber with two or three stoves, which one probably could not open from within at all. And suppose one should let the lover come down into the kitchen, the question then is, which way would you bring him first upon the roof? The cats in Germany can take this way to their loves, but not men. On the contrary, in England, the roofs make a kind of street which sometimes are better than those on the ground; and when a man is upon one, it costs him then no further trouble to get upon another than to run across a village street in winter.