in the firm, ardent tones of the Abbé de Ketteler, and woke the echoes of ill-quieted conscience in more than one guilty breast. Those whose posi tion enabled them to watch the countenances of such as Blum and Vogt, might have seen them turn pale, and cast their livid looks down to earth, as the minister of the Church, stretching forth his hand almost over their heads, exclaimed, in thrilling accents, "Not the actual assassins, but they who set them on are the guilty ones!" It was Banquo's ghost rising up before Macbeth, and from guilty faces and haggard eyes came the cowardly lie: "Thou canst not say I did it!" Nearly all the great troubles of the Assembly of Frankfort came from its discussions upon foreign questions; and this meeting, which was, first of all, to reconstitute Germany, and regulate the mode of its internal development, was set in a blaze by occurrences, of which the very first would *The Abbé de Ketteler (now Bishop of Mayence) belongs to one of those old Westphalian families, who rid the world of John of Leyden's fanatical followers. His eloquence is very great, and he has the true energy of a soldier of the Church. His speech at Lichnowsky's funeral was a noble act of courage, and his voice was the first to condemn aloud what others only ventured to condemn in their own hearts. suffice to show the endless obstacles opposed to German unity. To be convinced of this, it would suffice to follow, day by day, the labours of that unfortunate body, called the Committee of Fifty (Fünfziger Ausschuss) established in its own place by the Vor Parlament, and destined to take upon itself the task of bringing together the Constituent Assembly, and preserve order in the meanwhile. First, the German Legion in France troubled it; then the Poles broke its rest: then, what was to be done with the German population in Posen, and the Tcheques in Bohemia, what were they to do? Deputations were despatched to the latter, to order them to vote. The nationality of the Poles was recognized; but, whilst clamouring for the restoration of a Polish kingdom, the destinies of more than one million of Germans, who were exposed in Posen to all the evil consequences of Polish hate and Polish anarchy, were left uncared for, unattended to. Then, too, Schleswig-Holstein had to be drawn into this marvellous combination, and we have just seen what that occasioned; and Italy was not any longer to be a dependence of Austria, and that got a speedy answer from Radetsky. One after the other, the impossibilities of their task began to stare the Deputies of the Paulskirche in the face; but not one of all these impossibilities ever made them a whit more modest, but on they went, law-making and decreeing, and diminishing daily the majority necessary to give force to their resolutions, so as to accord with their own diminished numbers, until they found themselves swept away, and obliged to pack up the "Nation" in their pockets, and make off with it to a quieter place. Whether anything good or great could have come out of this Diet of Frankfort, had it been better conducted, and whether the Governments of the several different German States did not give to it the necessary support, or whether they were at all bound so to do; these are questions I leave to the decision of those learned Doctors, who, like Faust, have studied all-" Philosophy, Medicine, Law, and also, alas! Theology,"-and who must, consequently, be well adapted to undertake a statesman's task. Meanwhile, in the face of the motley Assembly, which ran away, and took its last refuge in the riding-school of Stuttgardt, I cannot help (supposing that Assembly to have been the last hope of the "United German Empire") exclaiming with Göthe: "Das liebe heil'ge Römische Reich and opining that it must seek for something more substantial than the flag and cockade, about which such a noise has been set up, and the carré de papier which blazes from the booksellers' shopwindows in Leipsic, and whereon a black eagle spreads its wings over a golden ground, the whole surrounded by a crimson border, with these words: "From the blackness of long night, through the streams of our red blood, to the golden fields of freedom!" So much for "Schwarz-Roth-Gelb !" CHAPTER IV. HANOVER AND HERRENHAUSEN. "Convictibus et hospitiis, non alia gens effusius indulget." THE only way not to do as all the world does, (a thing doubly difficult since the establishment of railways, and as delightful as difficult), is not to go straight on, but to make zigzags, and turn out of one's road as often as possible. For instance, the natural thing when one is going from Brussels and Berlin, is to proceed from Cologne to Hanover, therefore do not do it; leave Cologne, go down the Rhine to Baden and Carlsruhe, and, as you come back, go by Frankfort. Even though you should be obliged to return to Cologne, in order to pursue your journey, you will have broken its uniformity, and escaped doing what all the world does. Then, above all, do not stop at Düsseldorf, first, |