Growing up under influences like these, it is wonderful that young Hauff and his brother Hermann (his senior by two years) should ever have discovered that they were Germans at all; but they lost their father in 1809 and do not afterwards appear to have had any political connection with the government: and by 1815, when Wilhelm was only thirteen, the worst was over and the people of Stuttgart were left face to face with their amiable monarch; who surprised them and all the world by granting them of his own grace and favour an absolutely free constitution. This, however, on the principle of 'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,' was too much for the Württembergers, who profoundly mistrusted him: but before the matter could be settled King Frederick died, and King Wilhelm I, the husband of a Russian princess, and a brave soldier and able diplomatist, who had stood up for the rights of Germany in the deferred Elsass question, gave to his people, after much preparation, a very respectably constitutional form of government with two chambers, which included a representation both of clergy and old-imperial nobility, backed up by a strong Executive. This was in 1822, and the remaining five years of W. Hauff's life were passed in a happy country that had no history. It is usual of course to account for the excessively fertile development of literary culture in Germany at this time by the fact that the system of repression was so strong and effective as to drive all the moderate minds away from politics; but this will hardly hold good in Württemberg. Yet the educated classes there seem to have been completely indifferent to such politics as there were. But there were very few. Those who want to discover the conditions under which Hauff's earlier life passed should read (1) Goethe's Autobiography in Wahrheit and Dichtung, and (2) Histoire d'un Conscrit; and, by mixing the two well together, may arrive at some sort of idea what life was like in a small German state, on which were grafted the new horrors of a military despotism. It is not a pleasant picture, but if it bred a good many souls as dead to patriotism as Goethe's and Heine's, it also bred not a few Müllers and Uhlands and Arndts; and it bred Wilhelm Hauff. That Hauff, in his later years at least (if a man can be said to have later years who died at twenty-five), had caught much of the spirit of the heroes of the War of Liberation, is best seen from the few soul-stirring lyrics which he has left, especially the two odes which he wrote in 1823-4 on the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo; even more perhaps it is seen in his admiration for W. Müller, and in the affecting story that when on his deathbed he heard the news of the battle of Navarino, he cried, 'What news! I must go hence and tell it to Müller,' who preceded him to the grave by a few weeks.