astening toward its dissolution. All
sentiments of an enlarged patriotism were absorbed in particular and
provincial interests and prejudices. The very idea of national union
seemed to be lost with the great national recollections. There was no
feeling of pride in the past, no consciousness of a glorious
inheritance to inspire hope and confidence in the future. The
degenerate descendant walked among the mighty monuments of the power,
the genius, the art and spirit of his ancestors, with stupid unconcern
or contemptuous wonder. A German school of art, a German literature
were things neither believed in nor desired; that they had ever existed
was forgotten; the memorials of them were left to sleep among the
neglected lumber of history. The attention and patronage of the great
were engrossed by productions of foreign growth; above all the
language, the literature and manners of France exercised a despotic
sway over the higher and educated classes. The peculiar virtues of the
German character, the native strength of the German intellect, were
slighted, concealed, and as far as possible suppressed, while the
artificial graces of an exotic refinement were affectedly displayed,
and became the only pass into good society. The well-bred mimics
strutted in their borrowed plumes with all the vanity, though not quite
all the ease of their originals, and prided themselves on their
successful imitation, without perceiving how awkwardly the foreign
frippery sat on them, and how their ungainly movements betrayed them at
every step, and exposed them even to the polite ridicule of their
masters. The principles and opinions which had long been prevalent in
France, and now began to be loudly expressed and industriously
disseminated every where, were very extensively diffused over Germany
together with the literature by which they had been carried to their
highest maturity and perfection. They were maintained speculatively and
practically by some earnest and zealous advocates, and found a very
strong predisposition in their favour among the persons and classes who
were most interested in opposing them, and who, having adopted and
cherished and even ostentatiously displayed them as modish
distinctions, afterwards, when the inconvenient consequences stared
them in the face, began, with a dissimulation too gross and palpable to
attain its object, publicly to discountenance and check them. In the
meanwhile they exerted a powerful and pernicious