entirely worthy of the sentiment of scholarly esteem prompting the visit, behaved (if we exclude the dagger) with the vindictive jealousy of an injured Spanish beauty.  After a short prelude of gloom and obscure explosions, he discharged upon his faithless admirer the bolts of passionate logic familiar to the ears of flighty caballeros:—­’Either I am a fit object of your admiration, or I am not.  Of these things one—­either you are competent to judge, in which case I stand condemned by you; or you are incompetent, and therefore impertinent, and you may betake yourself to your country again, hypocrite!’ The admirer was for persuading the wounded scholar that it is given to us to be able to admire two professors at a time.  He was driven forth.

Perhaps this might have occurred in any country, and a comedy of The Pedant, discovering the greedy humanity within the dusty scholar, would not bring it home to one in particular.  I am mindful that it was in Germany, when I observe that the Germans have gone through no comic training to warn them of the sly, wise emanation eyeing them from aloft, nor much of satirical.  Heinrich Heine has not been enough to cause them to smart and meditate.  Nationally, as well as individually, when they are excited they are in danger of the grotesque, as when, for instance, they decline to listen to evidence, and raise a national outcry because one of German blood has been convicted of crime in a foreign country.  They are acute critics, yet they still wield clubs in controversy.  Compare them in this respect with the people schooled in La Bruyere, La Fontaine, Moliere; with the people who have the figures of a Trissotin and a Vadius before them for a comic warning of the personal vanities of the caressed professor.  It is more than difference of race.  It is the difference of traditions, temper, and style, which comes of schooling.

The French controversialist is a polished swordsman, to be dreaded in his graces and courtesies.  The German is Orson, or the mob, or a marching army, in defence of a good case or a bad—­a big or a little.  His irony is a missile of terrific tonnage:  sarcasm he emits like a blast from a dragon’s mouth.  He must and will be Titan.  He stamps his foe underfoot, and is astonished that the creature is not dead, but stinging; for, in truth, the Titan is contending, by comparison, with a god.

When the Germans lie on their arms, looking across the Alsatian frontier at the crowds of Frenchmen rushing to applaud L’ami Fritz at the Theatre Francais, looking and considering the meaning of that applause, which is grimly comic in its political response to the domestic moral of the play—­when the Germans watch and are silent, their force of character tells.  They are kings in music, we may say princes in poetry, good speculators in philosophy, and our leaders in scholarship.  That so gifted a race, possessed moreover of the stern good sense which collects the waters of laughter to make the wells, should show