Italis cum lyra ad Germanos veniat. The god of light,
coming to Germany from some more favoured world beyond it, over leagues
of rainy hill and mountain, making soft day there: that had ever been
the dream of the ghost-ridden yet deep-feeling and certainly meek
German soul; of the great Duerer, for instance, who had been the friend
of this Conrad Celtes, and himself, all German as he was, like a gleam
of real day amid that hyperborean German darkness--a darkness which
clave to him, too, at that dim time, when there were violent robbers,
nay, real live devils, in every German wood. And it was precisely the
aspiration of Carl himself. Those verses, coming to the boy's hand at
the right moment, brought a beam of effectual daylight to a whole
magazine of observation, fancy, desire, stored up from the first
impressions of childhood. To bring Apollo with his lyre to Germany! It
was precisely that he, Carl, desired to do--was, as he might flatter
himself, actually doing.

The daylight, the Apolline aurora, which the young Duke Carl claimed to
be bringing to his candle-lit people, came in the somewhat questionable
form of the contemporary French ideal, in matters of art and
literature--French plays, French architecture, French
looking-glasses--Apollo in the dandified costume of Lewis the
Fourteenth. Only, confronting the essentially aged and decrepit graces
of his model with his own essentially youthful temper, he invigorated
what he borrowed; and with him an aspiration towards the classical
ideal, so often hollow and insincere, lost all its affectation. His
doating grandfather, the reigning Grand-duke, afforded readily enough,
from the great store of inherited wealth which would one day be the
lad's, the funds necessary for the completion of the vast unfinished
Residence, with "pavilions" (after the manner of the famous Mansard)
uniting its scattered parts; while a wonderful flowerage of
architectural fancy, with broken attic roofs, passed over and beyond
the earlier fabric; the later and lighter forms being in part carved
adroitly out of the heavy masses of the old, honest, "stump Gothic"
tracery. One fault only Carl found in his French models, and was
resolute to correct. He would have, at least within, real marble in
place of stucco, and, if he might, perhaps solid gold for gilding.
There was something in the sanguine, floridly handsome youth, with his
alertness of mind turned wholly, amid the vexing preoccupations of an
a