he country. The true nobility of
Germany was no longer to be found among the priests,--Alcuin, Hrabanus
Maurus, Notker Teutonicus; nor among the knights,--Walther von der
Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and their patrons, Frederick II.,
Hermann von Thueringen, and Leopold of Austria. The intellectual sceptre of
Germany was wielded by a new nobility,--a nobility that had risen from the
ranks, like the priests and the knights, but which, for a time at least,
kept itself from becoming a caste, and from cutting away those roots
through which it imbibed its vigor and sustained its strength. It had its
castles in the universities, its tournaments in the diets of Worms and
Augsburg, and it counted among its members, dukes and peasants, divines
and soldiers, lawyers and artists. This was not, indeed, an hereditary
nobility, but on that very ground it is a nobility which can never become
extinct. The danger, however, which threatens all aristocracies, whether
martial, clerical, or municipal, was not averted from the intellectual
aristocracy of Germany. The rising spirit of caste deprived the second
generation of that power which men like Luther had gained at the beginning
of the Reformation. The moral influence of the universities in Germany was
great, and it is great at the present day. But it would have been greater
and more beneficial if the conceit of caste had not separated the leaders
of the nation from the ranks whence they themselves had arisen, and to
which alone they owed their position and their influence. It was the same
with the priests, who would rather form a hierarchy than be merged in the
laity. It was the same with the knights, who would rather form a select
society than live among the gentry. Both cut away the ground under their
feet; and the Reformers of the sixteenth century fell into the same snare
before they were aware of it. We wonder at the eccentricities of the
priesthood, at the conceit of the hereditary nobility, at the affectation
of majestic stateliness inherent in royalty. But the pedantic display of
learning, the disregard of the real wants of the people, the contempt of
all knowledge which does not wear the academic garb, show the same foible,
the same conceit, the same spirit of caste among those who, from the
sixteenth century to the present day, have occupied the most prominent
rank in the society of Germany. Professorial knight-errantry still waits
for its Cervantes. Nowhere have the object