Wales or Arabia, seem to be perfectly naturalised with you, and are as distinguishable from our German apparitions as a dandy of your boulevards from an Alsatian porter. Your Undinas and Melusinas are princesses-ours washerwomen. What would be the horror of Morgana if she encountered a German witch, old, naked, be-brimstoned, mounted on a broomstick, on her way to the Sabbath of the Brocken, where Satan expects her and her sisterhood under the form of a black ram?....

All these horrors came not directly indeed, but indirectly, from the Catholic Church; but man parts not willingly with what has been dear to his fathers-his predilections cling and glue themselves to it secretly, often, indeed, without his knowledge, even when it has been mutilated and disfigured. And thus the old system of popular superstition will probably outlive in Germany that Christian worship which has not, like it, any root in the ancient nationality. At the time of the Reformation, the memory of the Catholic legends was easily effaced, but not so the faith in enchantments and sorcerers. Luther threw overboard the miracles of popery, but he clung fast to the power of the devil and his agents.'-vol. i. pp. 19, 21, 33.

Man parts not willingly with what was dear to his fathers-and Christianity is to be supplanted by Pantheism, because Pantheism has, and Christianity has not, a root in the ancient nationality of the country of Luther and Melancthon!-This seems brave enough but even this is nothing to what ensues; for M. Heine now makes a vigorous effort to connect in some sort his assault on Christianity with Luther's warfare against popery. It is impossible not to smile at the intrepidity of this undertaking; but his view of Luther himself contains some features of truth which we never saw brought out with greater effect. This alumnus of a Saxon university is not, it would seem, without some shadowy traditions of respect for the founder of German Protestantism. Luther established freedom of thought-he was thus the harbinger-the legitimate ancestor M. Heine would fain consider him-of the Kants, the Fichtes, the Schellings, and the Hegels, who have successively reared that pyramid of rationalism on which poets and critics, animated with a pious reverence of their tattooed ancestors, are now to elevate anew the ornamental apex of pantheism.

It is a great mistake to suppose that the war against Catholicism, which Germany waged in the days of Luther, and that which France waged against Catholicism in the eighteenth century under the guidance of Voltaire, were influenced by the same motives. The case was the reverse. The struggle in Germany was one undertaken by Spiritualism, when she found that, though she indeed retained the name and title of power-the sovereignty de jure-Sensualism had quietly managed to get possession of the real sway, and reigned de facto. It was then that the indulgence-bearers were beaten out-the beautiful concubines of the priests replaced by sober wives-the

charming

charming images of the Madonna broken-a real puritanism established in the land. On the contrary, the French assault upon Catholicism was a war undertaken by Sensualism, when, feeling herself to be fully sovereign de facto, it seemed no longer to be endurable that Spiritualism (a worn-out de jure potentate) should condemn all her proceedings as illegitimate, and be continually uttering proclamations against them as disgraceful and abominable; and so-in place of combating seriously and chastely as in Germany-they carried on this war by jokes and pleasantries-for the theological disputations of the north they had merry satires-the object of which was generally to point out the contradictions and absurdities into which man falls when he aspires to be all spirit. The stories of the Queen of Navarre had already opened this fruitful subject; but the most malicious arrow of the polemical quiver was perhaps the "Tartuffe" of Molière.'-p. 41.

The French, it seems, have never understood the difference of principle between Luther's warfare and Voltaire's;-but this was only because they had failed to perceive how the practical application of Luther's principle was modified by the personal characteristics of the man.

People in France have conceived a totally false idea both of the German reformation and of the principal person that accomplished it. The chief cause of this misapprehension is, that Luther was not only the greatest man, but the most thoroughly German one, that has ever appeared in our annals; that his character united in perfection all the virtues and all the faults of the Germans-and that he is the living symbol of all the German Marvellous. He had, in fact, qualities which are so rarely conjoined, that we commonly consider them. as incompatible with each other. He was at once a mystical dreamer and a man of action. His thoughts had not only wings but hands. He spoke and (rare occurrence!) he did too: he was both the tongue and the sword of his age. Luther was, at the same time, a cold scholastic, a splitter of words, and an inspired prophet, intoxicated with the influence of the Divinity. After having passed the day painfully in wearing out his mind with dogmatical discussions, when evening came he would take his lute, and gazing on the stars surrender himself to ecstatic musings of piety, and dissolve his soul in melody. The same man who could throttle his antagonists with the coarseness of a fishwoman, could also modulate himself to a tone of language soft and sweet as that of an amorous virgin. Full of the sacred terrors of the Lord, ready for all sacrifices to the Spirit, he could lift himself to the purest realms of heavenly contemplation; and yet he was perfectly acquainted with the magnificences of this earth, and appreciated them honestly, and from his mouth fell that famous proverb, Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weiber, und Gesang,

Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebenlang—i, e.—

Who loves not women, wine, and song,

Will be a fool his lifetime long.

In short, he was a complete man. To call him a spiritualist would be

as

as absurd as to give him the title of a sensualist. What shall I say? there was something about him fresh, original, miraculous, inconceivable-that which all the Providential men have, a certain terrible simplicity, a rude and uncouth wisdom: he was sublime and narrowminded. Little does it become us to complain of the narrowness of his views. The dwarf mounted on the giant's shoulders may, no doubt, see farther than him, especially if he wears spectacles too-but with our high position we miss the lofty sentiment-the giant's heart which we cannot make our own. Still less does it become us to speak harshly of his faults: they have been more useful to us than the virtues of thousands of others. The delicacy of Erasmus and the mildness of Melancthon would never have given us such an impulse as we owe to the brutality of Brother Martin.'-p. 51.

Brutality was, then, the best possible pioneer for the army of Spiritualism! The great triumph of Martin Luther, however, was the degradation of the saints, and the extirpation of the belief that miracles were still at the command of the church. Thanks to him

the saints are all mediatized-and there are no more miracles. Even the establishment of the new religion of St. Simonism has not produced a single miracle-except, indeed, the payment of a tailor's bill, which St. Simon himself had left undischarged, ten years after his death, by a subscription among his disciples. Methinks I have still before me the excellent Père Olinde, as he drew himself up with enthusiasm in the Salle Taitbout, and exhibited to the assembly in one hand the bill, in the other the receipt; and grocers gaped, and tailors began to believe.'—vol. i. p. 53.

M. Heine thus resumes his Lutheran pedigree of Pantheism.

'Nowhere, not even in old Greece, has the human mind expanded and developed itself more freely, than it did in Germany from the middle of the last century down to the date of the French revolution. In Prussia, above all, the liberty of thought was boundless. The Marquis of Brandenburgh had comprehended that he who could only become a legitimate king in virtue of the great Protestant principle, that of liberty of thought, must of necessity maintain it. Since then things have altered, and the natural protector of our protestant freedom has come to an understanding with the ultramontane party: he has embraced the design to stifle it, and turned against us a weapon forged and used of old by the Popedom-the censure of the press. What a strange thing! We Germans are the most powerful and the most ingenious of the nations. Princes of our race are seated on all the thrones of Europe; our Rothschilds govern the exchanges of the world; our philosophers are at the head of all the sciences; we have invented gunpowder and printing-and yet if any one of us pulls the trigger of a pistol, he must pay a fine of three dollars-and if I insert in the Hamburgh Gazette these lines, "I inform my friends and acquaintance that my wife has been safely delivered