evidence, when he can think of no better way to reward himself for
his services than by having an order of knighthood manufactured for
himself. Could he have showed more plainly how ingrained these
formalities were in his nature? In the same way I must agree to what you
say of Rousseau's _Pygmalion_. This production certainly belongs among
the monstrosities, and is most remarkable as a symptom of the chief
malady of that period, when State and custom, art and talent were
destined to be stirred into a porridge with a nameless substance--which
was, however, called nature--yes, when they were indeed thus stirred and
beaten up together. I hope that my next volume will bring this operation
to light; for was not I, too, attacked by this epidemic, and was it not
beneficently responsible for the development of my being, which I cannot
now picture to myself as growing in any other fashion?

Now I must answer your question about the first Walpurgis-night. The
state of the case is as follows: Among historians there are some, and
they are men to whom one cannot refuse one's esteem, who try to find a
foundation in reality for every fable, every tradition, let it be as
fantastic and absurd as it will, and, inside the envelope of the
fairy-tale, believe they can always find a kernel of fact.

We owe much that is good to this method of treatment. For in order to go
into the matter great knowledge is required; yes, intelligence, wit, and
imagination are necessary to turn poetry into prose in this way. So now,
in this case, one of our German antiquarians has tried to vindicate the
ride of the witches and devils in the Hartz mountains, which has been
well known to us in Germany for untold ages, and to place it upon a firm
foundation, by the discovery of an historical origin. Which is, namely,
that the German heathen priests and forefathers, after they had been
driven from their sacred groves, and Christianity had been forced upon
the people, betook themselves with their faithful followers, at the
beginning of Spring, to the wild inaccessible mountains of the Hartz;
and there, according to their old custom, they offered prayers and fire
to the incorporeal God of Heaven and earth. In order to secure
themselves against the spying, armed converters, they hit upon the idea
of masking a number of their party, so as to keep their superstitious
opponents at a distance, and thus, protected by caricatures of devils,
to finish in peace the pure wor