sert, then?" "Hm, alas, your Majesty, we were got so
down in the world, and had such a time of it!"--"Well, try it one day
more; and if we cannot mend matters, thou and I will both desert."

A learned Doctor, one of the most recent on these matters, is astonished
why the Histories of Friedrich should be such dreary reading, and
Friedrich himself so prosaic, barren an object; and lays the blame
upon the Age, insensible to real greatness; led away by clap-trap
Napoleonisms, regardless of expense. Upon which Smelfungus takes him up,
with a twitch:--

"To my sad mind, Herr Doctor, it seems ascribable rather to the
Dryasdust of these Ages, especially to the Prussian Dryasdust, sitting
comfortable in his Academies, waving sublimely his long ears as he
tramples human Heroisms into unintelligible pipe-clay and dreary
continents of sand and cinders, with the Doctors all applauding.

"Had the sacred Poet, or man of real Human Genius, been at his work, for
the thousand years last past, instead of idly fiddling far away from
his work,--which surely is definable as being very mainly, That of
INTERPRETING human Heroisms; of painfully extricating, and extorting
from the circumambient chaos of muddy babble, rumor and mendacity, some
not inconceivable human and divine Image of them, more and more clear,
complete and credible for mankind (poor mankind dumbly looking up to him
for guidance, as to what it shall think of God and of Men in this Scene
of Things),--I calculate, we should by this time have had a different
Friedrich of it; O Heavens, a different world of it, in so many
respects!

"My esteemed Herr Doctor, it is too painful a subject. Godlike fabulous
Achilles, and the old Greek Kings of men, one perceives, after study,
to be dim enough Grazier Sovereigns, 'living among infinite dung,' till
their sacred Poet extricated them. And our UNsacred all-desecrating
Dryasdust,--Herr Doctor, I must say, it fills me with despair! Authentic
human Heroisms, not fabulous a whit, but true to the bone, and by all
appearance very much nobler than those of godlike Achilles and pious
AEneas ever could have been,--left in this manner, trodden under foot of
man and beast; man and beast alike insensible that there is anything
but common mud under foot, and grateful to anybody that will assure them
there is nothing. Oh, Doctor, oh, Doctor! And the results of it--You
need not go exclusively 'to France' to look at them. They are too
visible in the so