Either the glass or two (or more) of wine, or else his annoying contrast to the elegant, sedate Lector, set Schoppe's winnowing-mill with all its wheels in motion, though this humor of his found small scope on the enchanting island; and when Augusti expressed a wish that Schoppe might go to Germany under happier auspices than other painters, the latter drew forth a pack of gilded pictures of German patron saints, and said, shuffling them: "Many a one would here lay a papal miserere on the desk and sing it off, particularly if, like me, he had to go into winter quarters among the German ice and fog-banks in the middle of spring;--and it is with reluctance, I am free to confess, I leave the Harlequin and Pulzinella and Scapin, and the whole _comedia dell' arte_ behind. But the gentlemen saints whom I here shuffle have brought the lands under their charge into high and dry condition, and one passes through them with comfort. Mr. Architect, you laugh, but you know altogether too little of what these painted heavenly advowees hourly undertake in behalf of the German circles. Mr. Architect, show me, after all, a country anywhere, in which so many cudgels, programmes, professors, _Perukes-allongées_, learned advertisements, imperial notices, cits and surburbans, ceremonies, coronations, and Heidelberg tubs, but without indwelling Diogeneses, are to be mustered together as in the aforementioned? Or I appeal to you, Mr. Von Augusti! Point out to me, I pray, one single territory which is provided with such a _Long Parliament_, namely, a most lengthy Diet of the Empire, as it were, an extraordinarily wholesome _pillula perpetua_[11] which the patient is incessantly swallowing, and which as incessantly purges him; and who is not reminded, as well as myself, in this connection, of the _capitulatio perpetua_, and in general of the body politic of the Empire, that _perpetuum immobile_,--and on good grounds?" Here Schoppe drank. "The body of the Empire becomes thereby, like the first principle of morals, or like virgin earth, altogether insoluble; nay, supposing one of us were to take an electoral sword, and cut it in two therewith, as if it were an earwig, still the half with the teeth would, like the cloven earwig, turn round and eat the latter half clean up,--and then there would be the whole continuous earwig rejoined and well fed into the bargain. It is not by any means to be regretted as a consequence of this close _nexus_ of the Empire, that the corpus can devour and digest its own limbs, as the brook-crab does its stomach, without any real harm to itself, so that the corpus, like a Homeric god, can only be wounded, but not killed. Take this bunchy polypus-stalk, I often say, mash it to a pulp with Rösel,--turn it wrong side outward like a glove,--like Lichtenberg, cut the polypus in two dexterously with a hair,--like Trembley, stick and incorporate several severed limbs into one another,