A word now of the students, and I have done. Whatever the absurdities in
their code of honour, however ludicrous the etiquette of the 'comment'
as it is called, there is a world of manly honesty and true-heartedness
among them. There is nothing mean or low, nothing dishonourable or
unworthy in the spirit of the Burschen-schaft. Exaggerated ideas
of their own importance, an overweening sense of their value to
the Fatherland, there are in abundance, as well as a mass of crude,
unsettled notions about liberty and the regeneration of Germany. But,
after all, these are harmless fictions; they are not allied to any evil
passions at the time, they lead to no bad results for the future. The
murder of Kotzebue, and the attempt on the life of Napoleon by Staps,
were much more attributable to the mad enthusiasm of the period than to
the principles of the Student-league. The spirit of the nation revolted
at the tyranny they had so long submitted to, and these fearful crimes
were the agonised expression of endurance pushed to madness. Only they
who witnessed the frantic joy of the people when the tide of fortune
turned against Napoleon, and his baffled legions retreated through
Germany on their return from the Russian campaign, can understand
how deeply stored were the wrongs for which they were now to exact
vengeance. The _Voelker Schlacht_ (the 'people's slaughter'), as they
love to call the terrible fight of Leipsic, was the dreadful recompense
of all their sufferings.

When the French Revolution first broke out, the German students, like
many wiser and more thinking heads than theirs in our own country, were
struck with the great movement of a mighty people in their march to
liberty; but when, disgusted with the atrocities that followed, they
afterwards beheld France the first to assail the liberties and trample
on the freedom of every other country, they regarded her as a traitor to
the cause she once professed. And while their apathy in the early wars
of the republican armies marked their sympathy with the wild notions of
liberty of which Frenchmen affected to be the apostles in Europe, yet
when they saw the lust of conquest and the passion for dominion usurp
the place of those high-sounding virtues--_Liberte, Egalite_--the
reverse was a tremendous one, and may well excuse, if excuse were
needful, the proud triumph of the German armies when they bivouacked in
the streets of Paris.

The changed fortunes of the Continent have