Herr Jerusalem has observed, that the barbarism which often springs up, close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of strengthening mudbath, good for averting the over-refinement, wherewith such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper classes,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nuernberg, to whom the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred and eighty Academic Freedoms,--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus summed up,[35]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much. This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he had contrived to execute. Let us hear him: His landlord, who was at the same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole community of hens: Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet: in general their main equipments, like Phoenixes, existed but in the singular number; one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was the national uniform of the company; and several other _ones_, Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related, perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one of this famishing _coro_ invented means of appropriating the Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves, as the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow Nature, continued he,--"_fictio sequitur naturam_,"--it behoved them to lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his fishing-tackle, anglerwise, down into the court. In a few seconds the barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen