five years of W. Hauff's life were passed in a
happy country that had no history. It is usual of course to account for
the excessively fertile development of literary culture in Germany at
this time by the fact that the system of repression was so strong and
effective as to drive all the moderate minds away from politics; but
this will hardly hold good in Wuerttemberg. Yet the educated classes
there seem to have been completely indifferent to such politics as
there were. But there were very few.

Those who want to discover the conditions under which Hauff's earlier
life passed should read (1) Goethe's Autobiography in Wahrheit and
Dichtung, and (2) Histoire d'un Conscrit; and, by mixing the two well
together, may arrive at some sort of idea what life was like in a small
German state, on which were grafted the new horrors of a military
despotism. It is not a pleasant picture, but if it bred a good many
souls as dead to patriotism as Goethe's and Heine's, it also bred not a
few Muellers and Uhlands and Arndts; and it bred Wilhelm Hauff. That
Hauff, in his later years at least (if a man can be said to have
later years who died at twenty-five), had caught much of the spirit
of the heroes of the War of Liberation, is best seen from the few
soul-stirring lyrics which he has left, especially the two odes which
he wrote in 1823-4 on the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo; even
more perhaps it is seen in his admiration for W. Mueller, and in the
affecting story that when on his deathbed he heard the news of the
battle of Navarino, he cried, 'What news! I must go hence and tell it
to Mueller,' who preceded him to the grave by a few weeks.

Hauff and his brother were voracious readers. Their maternal
grandfather, 'a learned jurist,' (one trembles to think what a learned
German jurist must have been like in the first decade of this century,)
had a good library, consisting chiefly of old Law and History books,
but including also a considerable number of romances; 'Smollett,
Fielding, and Goldsmith were there,' says his biographer, Gustav
Schwab, in the life which he prefixed to the 1837 (first collected)
edition of Hauff's works. Schwab relates, not without humour, how the
boys would play at fortress building and sieges with some of the more
ponderous of the volumes, and the delight which they took in battering
down a breastwork composed of the 'Acta Pacis Westphalicae,' perhaps at
the very time at which the Congress of Vienna w