as engaged upon the same
job. But in the way of reading, they battened chiefly upon the old
German historical romances, Hardleder's 'Ursache des Deutschen Krieges'
especially, and it was from works like these that Wilhelm caught that
old-imperial swing and flow of ideas which carries us so powerfully
through Lichtenstein and the 'Phantasien.' The plan of turning a boy
loose in a library is sometimes justified by results, although not
always in the way expected. But although Wilhelm got a certain amount
of classics drilled into him at the cloister school of Blaubeuern,
and afterwards studied 'Philology, Philosophy, and Theology,' from
1820-1824, at the University of Tuebingen, 'more,' says Schwab, 'to
please his mother than from any leaning of his own to those subjects,'
he never could write Greek or Latin verses like his brother, or pass
for anything but an essentially poor scholar. But several other people
who have afforded some pleasure to the world at large have been
essentially poor scholars.

This deficiency did not affect him much; his mother, though apparently
not wealthy, had good interest, and procured for him, when he left the
University, the position of private tutor in the family of 'the at that
time War's-council's-President, later War's-minister von Huegel' at
Stuttgart, where he remained two years, with apparently abundant
leisure for exercising his talent for writing poetical romances and
fairy tales, of which during the last two years of his life he poured
forth an incessant stream. It is worth while noting that in one of
these--the first part of the 'Memoirs of Satan' (not the completed
edition of these memoirs as they now stand)--is a passage in which the
author falls foul of the great Autocrat of German Literature apropos of
some lines in Faust; which was a more daring thing for a young fellow
of four-and-twenty to do than it is possible for a man living in a free
country to imagine. The rash youth afterwards repented, and expunged
the obnoxious passage when he finished the memoirs of his black
Majesty.

Perhaps it would have been as well if there had been no expunging, at
least we may dare to say so on this side of the water, where less and
less divinity hedges the person of the great man-god of letters every
day. Hauff, however, had a tender heart, and did not like to see what a
big hole he had made by casting a stone at the man-god; and with the
modesty of twenty-four he begged pardon. History d