| Description | Thanks for the letters of introduction; is en route to the south of Germany and Switzerland; leaves for Munich tomorrow; German professors more diligent than their counterparts at Oxford and Cambridge; does not blame them for keeping lectures short in hot weather, as he has an "abhorrencce of fagging in the Dog-days"; rumours of a revolution in Prussia, where the King's use of his subjects of Neufchatel (newly recovered as a province by him) as a Town Watch in Berlin, in which city they were reviled as Frenchmen, led to the employment of a regiment of Uhlans and the Palace Guard to clear the streets, after a drunken tailor had provoked an incident culminating in a death and some disorder; the quiet patience of the Prussian people; a short history of Prussian government; the weakness of a militarily-dominated absolute monarchy; has visited Dresden and been thoroughly "rooked" by its "Showers and Keepers"; Toplitz and Carlsbad as spa-towns, and the virtues of their waters; the "stupidly Catholic" attitudes to life of the people; John Huss the hangman and headsman at Egra, and his "modus operandi"!; the charms of Bohemia and the fine roads of Bavaria.
An extremely interesting and valuable contemporary account of the German scene, from the pen of an intelligent and observant man, who nevertheless, alas, has all the Kenrick contempt for punctuation ! |