playing at the Opera House in Philadelphia. It was first published in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, of which paper I was one of the editors. I subsequently republished it in Graham's Magazine, with a small wood-cut, not larger than an English shilling, before each verse. These cuts were very clever and were executed by an engraver named Scattergood. Der Freischütz was one of several burlesque opera librettos which I wrote. They all had great run through the newspapers. Der Freischütz was especially popular, but when published in a work with the rest of the Breitmann Ballads, the reviews declared it to be much inferior to any of the others."

No matter what the reviews then said, of all these burlesques, Der Freischütz alone has lived. Only one besides, La Somnambula, have I found, even among my Uncle's papers. It is in pamphlet form, the verses witty, a characteristic drawing by him decorating the title. But of the remaining numbers in the series, I doubt if a trace could be discovered by the most ardent collector. Der Freischütz in everyday English would probably have gone with the rest. For the sake of the parody, however, it had been put into the English of the German still struggling with an unfamiliar grammar and construction. To the hard-worked journalist, who had scribbled it off in his scant leisure moments, the subject and the language must have brought some charm of old associations, some memories of Heidelberg and Munich days. For once tried, it pleased him so well that he tried it again before that same year had come to an end. Hans Breitmann gife a barty, Vhere ish dot barty now?

been loudest in asking, "Vhere ish dot barty now?" But no lines were ever less premeditated, ever more wholly the result of chance. "While editing Graham's Magazine I had one day a space to fill," their author says in his Memoirs, as he had already written in his copy of the 1871 edition. "In a hurry I knocked off Hans Breitmann's Barty (1856); I gave it no thought whatever." "It was written only to fill up a page," the note in the 1889 edition says, "and I never expected that any one would notice it."

He thought so little of it, that in the Ballads immediately following the Barty, Breitmann was left out as often as not. The real link at first was the language, though nothing was further from his intention than that there should be any link of any kind. For, to quote again from the unpublished notes, "The Love Song, 'O, vere mine lofe a sugar-powl,' was composed, the first two verses, one night in Philadelphia after going to bed. It was with a great effort that I rose and wrote them down. I lived at the time at Mrs. Sandgren's in Spruce Street." The ballad of De Maiden mit Nodings On "was composed while sitting in a railway carriage, I think in Ohio in 1864. I carried it for a year or more in my memory before I wrote it down." Wein Geist was written in a letter to Miss D. L. Colton to show "that it was easier to write such rhymes than prose," just as a few years later Breitmann in Rome was written in that city for Miss Edith Story. Schnitzerl's Philosopede was "the result of a suggestion of John Forney, Jr." "With the exception of the Barty, most of the poems in the first edition were written merely to fill up letters to Charles Astor Bristed," a fellow journalist living in New York.

But if Breitmann were an accident, it was an accident that could have happened to no other man. Whistler has established beyond contradiction that the picture painted by the artist in a few days may represent the training of a lifetime. And so, the Ballads, knocked off anyhow, were the outcome of a long apprentice

ship of study and travel and experience. Otherwise, they would never have developed into a great Breitmann myth. The language alone was not sufficient to ensure their survival, though it counted for more in the days before the rising of the flood of dialect than it could now. It was clever, uncouth in itself, but pliant and rhythmical as he wrote it. And it was real, not an invention. He had the sense to realize that not only would no two Germans, new to English, speak it alike, but that "no one individual is invariably consistent in his errors or inaccuracies. Every reader who knows any foreign language imperfectly is aware that he speaks it better at one time than another, and it would consequently have been a grave error to reduce the broken and irregular jargon of the book to a fixed and regular language." The consistency of its inconsistency gave Breitmann's English a picturesqueness, to which his further experiments in other tongues contributed so flamboyantly that Octave Delapierre, the authority who had defined macaronics as "the extravagance of poetry," pronounced Breitmann's Interview with the Pope to be one of the finest examples. If extravagance depends on recklessness or first-rate badness, then "from this point of view," the author modestly admits, “it is possible that Breitmann's Latin lyric is not devoid of merit, since assuredly nobody ever wrote a worse."

But macaronics are for the few; for the many, the cleverness of the German-English would have been no attraction, would, on the contrary, have been a drawback, the many finding it quite hard enough work to read at all, without the additional labor of consulting a glossary. Even the down-East Yankee would have made Hosea Biglow impossible, if Hosea Biglow had not had something to say that people wanted to hear. And Breitmann, too, had something to say, something that his author could not have said as expressively in any other way. Moreover, like all popular types, from Macchus, through the innumerable Pulcinellos and Pierrots,

Harlequins and Pantaloons of centuries, Breitmann had in him the elements of human nature. He may have been an alien in America, but he was a man, and a very real man, wherever he might go. He lived in the Ballads; that is why the Ballads have lived.

What the author saw in him, as he gradually grew into a definite, substantial personality, is plainly stated in the author's preface to the English edition, 1871, one of the battered types of the men of '48," beneath whose "unlimited faith in pleasure lie natural shrewdness, an excellent early education, and certain principles of honesty and good fellowship, which are all the more clearly defined from his moral looseness in details, identified in the Anglo-Saxon mind with total depravity;" — or, to quote from a letter to me, a man in whom "a kind of heroic and romantic grandeur is combined with German naïveté and rowdyism."

In other words, Hans Breitmann, adventurer and vagabond, was as German by nature as by birth; and that was his salvation. Had the Ballads, like the Biglow Papers, been intended to convey a moral satire or preach a patriotic sermon, Breitmann would have been intolerable to Americans; they could not have stood the cynical indifference with which he began his career, by drinking and rioting his way through scenes and events that were so little of a laughing matter to them. But the beauty of Breitmann was that he was not an American. It was possible to look on at the part he took in the great national drama, and still laugh"the laughter which blends with tears." Besides, in no native adventurer would there have been the mixture of "philosophy and sentiment, beer, music, and romance" that enabled this one American in particular, with his German training and traditions, to laugh a little at himself, as he laughed with Breitmann. The native adventurer would have left sentiment at home when he went looting, he could not have drunk his beer to the murmur of metaphysics, nor searched for contraband

whiskey to the symphonies of Beethoven, nor played the game of politics on the romantic stage. He might, I do not deny, have got "troonk ash bigs" at his own or any other man's "barty." But only the German could have moralized at the end of the orgy.

An American in the rôle of "Bummer" may not be inconceivable, but no one could believe in the American "Bummer" who read Fichte, and speculated as to whether

De human souls of beoples

Exisdt in deir idées.

But speculation and argument were as much a habit with the German "Bummer," as his beer and his pipe, — that is what redeems him from sheer animalism. There is no humor in mere brutality. Breitmann, being a German, when he drank himself drunk on the battlefield, once drunk, could touch the skies. His inspiration might be schnapps,

De schmell voke oop de boetry, but inspired, he could burst into lyrical

song:

Ash sommer pring de roses

Und roses pring de dew,

So Deutschland gifes de maidens

Who fetch de bier for you.
Komm Maidelein! rothe Waengelein!
Mit wein-glass in your paw!
Ve'll pe troonk among de roses
Und get soper on de shtraw!

He might be the most inveterate looter in the train of a great army, but let the organ peal out

dings from Mozart,
Beethoven und Mehùl,
Mit chorals of Sebastian Bach

Sooplime und peaudiful,

and he was feeling "like holy saints," and the tears running down his face, while he and his men, "droonk as blitz on contraband whiskey,-

singed ash if mit singen dey Might indo Himmel win. Whatever Breitmann did,

He dinked and dinked so heafy
Ash only Deutschers can.

Wherever he journeyed, he was sure to be

A workin' out life's mission here
Soobjectifly und grand.
Some beoblesh run de peaudiful
Some vorks philosophie ;
Der Breitmann solfe de infinide
Ash one eternal shpree.

A vagabond of vagabonds, rollicking from adventure to adventure like the hero of the old Picaresque novel, he was a German through it all; the feeling of romance young in his heart, his soul susceptible to the sound of music or the summons of sentiment, the pathos lying very close to the humor, and poetry in the laughter. "I have a letter from Dr. O. W. Holmes in which he says that the death of Von Stossenheim drew two long-tailed tears from his eyes," is a note written on the margin of Breitmann's Going to Church, while George Boker's admiration for a special verse in the same poem is recorded in another marginal note. And Breitmann's thoughts were ever soaring so to the Infinite, so many tags of old verse and bits of old legend were ever running through his head, that only those familiar with German philosophy and literature can appreciate the learning crammed into what, to the casual reader, seems mere "comic verse." And he had, as has been written of him, "a ripe talent for events," and as it happened, adventure was more than ever in the way of the Philadelphia journalist back from the war, who, in those chaotic times,-profitable for none but the contractor,found himself, to his own surprise, now oil-prospecting in guerrilla-swept Tennessee; now rent-collecting in the wilds of West Virginia; now off on some great railroad-advertising excursion to Kansas and the then furthermost frontier of civilization, among Indians and buffaloes. And wherever he had to go, sometimes with sad sinking of heart and depression of spirits, he could take Breitmann and carry it off with a laugh.

If the German in Breitmann was beyond the average American's comprehension, if his "well-balanced mixture of stoicism and epicurism" was peculiarly

Teutonic; still he was so human, such a good fellow, he was so gay in his endurance as in his excess, that every American could understand the man himself, while his humor was of a kind that every American could enjoy, without a suspiIcion of the discomfort there was in the laugh over Hosea Biglow's humor. And so, though Breitmann's creator thought little of him, other people, fortunately, began to think a great deal. The public became conscious of the existence of this big, jolly German with his unquenchable thirst and irrepressible good spirits, and were on the lookout for his reappearance. Letters containing the ballads were preserved by the friends lucky enough to have received them, especially by Bristed, who, after sending his series to a sporting paper, tried to surprise the author with a privately printed collection. The attempt failed. The Ballads might never have appeared at all, it is stated in the preface to the 1871 edition, had not Ringwalt, a collaborator on the Philadelphia Press, also a printer, had such faith in the work as to have it set up in his office, offering to try an edition, which, however, was transferred to Peterson Brothers. In the correspondence of a very much later date, I have come upon a letter (dated March 10, 1896) from an old friend, a fellow journalist on the Press, who tells an amusing story I now publish for the first time, of this printing. "I recall," he says, "one curious incident that might be worth putting into your second volume of memoirs. In the Breitmann Ballads the compositors frequently made mistakes in setting up the German patois, and you would consider with respect their errors, whether or not to adopt them. I recollect your frequently consulting me on such points, and we would weigh the merits or demerits of their slips or involuntary scholarship."

Breitmann, the creature of chance, when he achieved the dignity of publication in book form, took the world by storm. The Petersons, uncertain, I sup

pose, as to his reception, had begun timidly by issuing the Ballads in parts. But the First was quickly followed by Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth. The publishers, one of the old, highly respectable firms of my native town, showed small consideration for future collectors and bibliographers. Dates—in Breitmann anyway

papers left by my

were nothing to them. But from the year of the copyright entry according to Act of Congress, contemporary letters, and the date of the first English edition, I know that the Ballads were published in 1869, in the little paper-covered "Parts," of which, to my sorrow, odd numbers only have survived in the far from complete Breitmann collection I have been able to make from the books and Uncle to my care. In 1871 the five Parts were collected into a fat, solid, substantially bound volume, but before this they had already gone to England. In a word, Breitmann "flashed" into popularity, as into being. Trübner, who went to the trouble of writing an introduction and extending the glossary, was the authorized English publisher, a note in the English edition signed "Charles Godfrey Leland" and dated "Philadelphia, 1869," distinctly states. But this made no difference to English publishers, whose virtuous objection to piracy weakened at the point where piracy meant profit to themselves. Two pirated editions appeared in the same year. One of the pirates, in a letter now among my Breitmann papers, suggested that the Ballads should be his because he was the first English publisher of the Biglow Papers, though what Lowell thought of him in that capacity he did not trouble to explain. Both these editions amiably presented Breitmann with a ballad he could not have claimed had he wanted to, and both published an introduction that almost reconciles me to-day to the piracy. For, in accounting for Breitmann, it explains that, "already the English language in America has become to some extent Germanized. Thus, all the familiar words in German speech,

the questions and answers of every-day life and the names of common objects, are as well known and recognized among all classes throughout the Union as the coins of Prussia and Austria are current and acceptable tender;" and I have no doubt the Englishman, upon whom it had not then dawned that complete ignorance of everything American might turn out a bad investment, closed the book confirmed in his disdain of a country where people talked such barbarous English.

In England, as in America, Breitmann went into edition after edition, in "Parts," and "Complete." He himself appeared on the popular stage, and songs were made of his ballads. I have the music of the Maiden mit Nodings On, dedicated to the Crichton Club. His name was given to the cigars smoked by the many, and it was borrowed for their work by the few who, no doubt, hoped to find in it a passport to fame. I have a curious little pamphlet called De Gospel according to Saint Breitmann (1871), the first number in a series of Ramequins by "Cullen Morfe," of whom and his Ramequins I know no more, and, taking this number as a sample, I think it likely that more is not worth knowing. I have also the second and third numbers (the first, alas, missing) of a paper called Hans Breitmann, a weekly after the pattern of Punch, started in the same year (1871): poor stuff as I try to read it now, but for a moment threatening to be serious in its consequences. For there were critics of the time, too obtuse to distinguish between the real and the sham, who declared that the joke was being carried too far, that the British public was not going to stand a surfeit, even of Hans Breitmann, and that Mr. Leland might as well know it; and to Mr. Leland, Trübner in a panic sent one of these criticisms posthaste. "It is written in such a nasty spirit," the accompanying letter says, "that I think should not you pass it over in silence. As the continued identification of your name with the Hans Breitmann periodical, which in its last number

is exceedingly weak and shallow, could possibly damage you, will you not publicly disclaim all connection with it, perhaps in a letter to the Athenæum ?”

I am not sure if the letter was written, but Trübner's panic seems the less necessary in the face of other and worse things Breitmann had to face, -the indignation of Germany, for instance, and the praise of France. It was his exploit as Uhlan, included in the 1871 complete edition of the Ballads, that roused Germany's indignation. "This poem," says one of those little marginal notes that are invaluable in the authentic history of Breitmann, "gave offence to many Germans, even to those who had been in the war. But the author's preface in 1871 had already protested: "It is needless, perhaps, to say that I no more intended to ridicule or satirize the German cause or the German method of making war . . . than I did those of the American Union, when I first introduced Breitmann as a 'Bummer' plundering the South." However, most people, if they must be laughed at, would rather do the laughing themselves, and after 1870 the Germans, in the pride of conquest, would probably have resented their own laughter. As to the praise, it took the form of translation by Théodore Bentzon, who was writing a series of articles on "Les Humoristes Américains" for the Revue des Deux Mondes, and undertook to introduce Breitmann to French readers (August, 1872). I do not suppose, in the whole course of his career, Breitmann could ever have felt himself so complete a stranger as at his own "Barty" transformed into a soirée, and I quote the first and last verses to show how severe may sometimes be the penalty of praise.

"Hans Breitmann a donné une soirée; on y a joué du piano. J'y tombai amoureux d'une Américaine; son nom était Mathilde Jane; elle avait des cheveux bruns cendrés comme un craquelin; ses yeux étaient bleu de ciel; lorsqu'ils regardaient dans les miens, ils fendaient mon cœur en deux."