"The cynical, naive, free nature's-men of the present day--Franks and Germans--are almost like the naked honorables, whom I have seen bathing in the Pleisse, Spree, and Saale. They were, as was said, very naked, white, and natural, and savages, but the black cue-tail of culture fell down over their white backs. Some great, tall men, and fathers of their times, like Rousseau, Diderot, Sidney, Ferguson, Plato, have laid aside their worn-out breeches, and their disciples have taken them and worn them, and because they sat so wide, long, and open upon their diminutive bodies, have called themselves _sansculottes_ (men without breeches). "Truly, instead of the sword, I could also very well grasp the penknife, and, as writing Cæsar, rise, to better the world, and be useful to it, and use it. I shall always remember the conversation which I once held upon this subject with a universal German librarian of Berlin, as we walked quietly up and down in the menagerie. 'Every one should surely enrich his native land with his talents, which else would lie buried,' said the German librarian. 'To constitute a native land, it is necessary, first and foremost, that there should be some _land_,' said I. 'The Maltese librarian, however, who here speaks, first saw the light at sea under a pitch-black storm. Of knowledge I possess, of course, enough, and know that one has it, like a glassful of cow-pock rationally taken, only to inoculate one's self withal. The scholar, for his part, only swallows it again, in order to give it out from himself, and so it goes on. Thus does the light, like the glimmering brand in the game, "Kill the Fox, and Sell the Skin," pass from hand to hand, until, however, to be sure, the brand goes out in one,--mine,--and there remains.'