. The result is
evident: a good hand is a rare thing In Germany. It is a good sign, that
of late years public acts and records, works of learning, all the higher
literature, in fact, not purely national, as poetry and romance, are all
printed in the Roman character. Nor will any look upon this as a servile
imitation. Some of the most national of German writers and scholars, as
the brothers Grimm, have pronounced themselves loudly in favor of the
change. The tendency of the age is towards universality. It will occur
to none to talk of French imitation because chemists make use of the
excellent and universally applicable system of the decimal French
weights and measures.

What has been said above is not altogether irrelevant as characterizing
the tendency of the higher institutions of learning. Every movement in
Germany, even the least, since the Reformation, whose chief
propagators were professors in the universities,--Luther, Reuchlin,
Melancthon,--every permanent and pervading conquest of the new and good
over the old and worn-out, has issued from the lecture-room. Whatever
sticklers for old forms and crab-like progress may be found, there is
always an overbalancing power. The unity of Germany as one nation has
never stood a better chance of being realized than now, when the very
men who were students and flocked as volunteers when the iron hand of
Napoleon I. weighed heavily on their Fatherland stand as lecturers in
the days of Napoleon III., warning of the past, and preaching louder
than Schiller or Koerner or Arndt for the brotherhood of Prussian and
Bavarian, of those that dwell on the Rhine and those that inhabit the
regions of the Danube.

Thanks, not to her statesmen, not to her nobility, not to her princes
even, that Germany has at last fairly shaken off the self-imposed yoke
of servile French imitation, but thanks to her scholars who centre in
her twenty-six universities! There was a time, and that not a century
ago, when the German language was considered to be of too limited
circulation for works of general scientific interest. Lectures were
all delivered in Latin, until Thomasius broke open a new path, and now
lessons otherwise than in the vernacular tongue are exceptions. French
was long the universal medium. Even Humboldt wrote most of his works
in that language; and it is not two years since one of the most
distinguished Egyptian scholars of Prussia published his History of
Egypt in French. The last re