without idle aspirations after impracticable good. Sandt. I understand the reproof, and receive it humbly and gratefully. You did well in writSandt. O sir! you lead me where I tremble to ing the dramas, and the novels, and the travels; step; to the haunts of your intellect, to the re-but, pardon my question, who called you to the cesses of your spirit. Alas! alas! how small and courts of princes in strange countries? how vacant is the central chamber of the lofty Kotzebue. They themselves. pyramid ? Kotzebue. Is this to me? Sandt. To you, and many mightier. Reverting to your own words; could not you yourself have remained in the sphere you were placed in? Kotzebue. What sphere? I have written dramas and novels and travels. I have been called to the Imperial Court of Russia. Sandt. You sought celebrity: I blame not that. The thick air of multitudes may be good for some constitutions of mind, as the thinner of solitudes is for others. Some horses will not run without the clapping of hands; others fly out of the course rather than hear it. But let us come to the point. Imperial courts! What do they know of letters? What letters do they countenance, do they tolerate? Kotzebue. Plays. Sandt. Playthings. Sandt. On their business. O ye paviours of the dreary road along which their cannon rolls for conquest! my blood throbs at every stroke of your rammers. When will ye lay them by? Kotzebue. We are not such drudges. Sandt. Germans! Germans! Must ye never have a rood on earth ye can call your own, in the vast inheritance of your fathers? Kotzebue. Those who strive and labor, gain it; and many have rich possessions. Sandt. None; not the highest. Sandt. They have no more right to take you away from your country, than to eradicate a forest, or to subvert a church in it. You belong to the land that bore you, and were not at liberty (if right and liberty are one, and unless they are, they are good for nothing), you were not at liberty, I repeat it, to enter into the service of an alien. Kotzebue. No magistrate, higher or lower, forbade me. Fine notions of freedom are these! Sandt. A man is always a minor in regard to his fatherland; and the servants of his fatherland are wrong and criminal if they whisper in his ear that he may go away, that he may work in another country, that he may ask to be fed in it, and that he may wait there until orders and tasks are given for his hands to execute. Being a German, you voluntarily placed yourself in a position where you might eventually be coerced to act against Germans. Kotzebue. I would not. Sandt. Perhaps you think so. Sandt. We all do; yet duties are transgressed, and daily. Where the will is weak in accepting, it is weaker in resisting. Already have you left the ranks of your fellow-citizens; already have you taken the enlisting-money and marched away. Kotzebue. Phrases! metaphors! and let me tell you, M. Sandt, not very polite ones. You have hitherto seen little of the world, and you speak rather the language of books than of men. Kotzebue. Perhaps you may think them inse- Sandt. What! are books written by some creacure; but they are not lost yet, although the tures of less intellect than ours? I fancied them rapacity of France does indeed threaten to swal- to convey the language and reasonings of men. low them up. But her fraudulence is more to be I was wrong, and you are right, Von Kotzebue ! apprehended than her force. The promise of They are, in general, the productions of such as liberty is more formidable than the threat of ser- have neither the constancy of courage nor the vitude. The wise know that she never will bring continuity of sense, to act up to what they know us freedom; the brave know that that she never to be right, or to maintain it, even in words, to can bring us thraldom. She herself is alike im- the end of their lives. You are aware that I am patient of both; in the dazzle of arms she mis-speaking now of political ethics. This is the takes the one for the other, and is never more worst I can think of the matter; and bad enough agitated than in the midst of peace. is this. Sandt. The fools who went to war against her, did the only thing that could unite her; and every sword they drew was a conductor of that lightning which fell upon their heads. But we must now look at our homes. Where there is no strict union, there is no perfect love; and where no perfect love, there is no true helper. Are you satisfied, sir, at the celebrity and the distinctions you have obtained? Kotzebue. You misunderstand me. Our conduct must fall in with our circumstances. We may be patriotic, yet not puritanical in our patriotism; not harsh, nor intolerant, nor contracted. The philosophical mind should consider the whole world as its habitation, and not look so minutely into it as to see the lines that divide nations and governments; much less should it act the part of a busy shrew, and take pleasure in giving loose to the tongue, at finding things a little out of place. Kotzebue. My celebrity and distinctions, if I must speak of them, quite satisfy me. Neither in youth nor in advancing age, neither in diffi- Sandt. We will leave the shrew where we find cult nor in easy circumstances, have I ventured to her she certainly is better with the comedian proclaim myself the tutor or the guardian of than with the philosopher. But this indistinctmankind. ness in the moral and political line begets indif Kotzebue. I really beg your pardon. faithful. ference. He who does not keep his own country more closely in view than any other, soon mixes Sandt. I ought not then to have heard you, and land with sea, and sea with air, and loses sight of beg yours. My madness could release many from everything, at last, for which he was placed in a worse; from a madness which hurts them grievcontact with his fellow men. Let us unite, if iously; a madness which has been and will be possible, with the nearest: let usages and fami- hereditary: mine, again and again I repeat it, liarities bind us: this being once accomplished, would burst asunder the strong swathes that fasten let us confederate for security and peace with all them to pillar and post. Sir! sir! if I entertained the people round, particularly with people of the not the remains of respect for you, in your domessame language, laws, and religion. We pour out tic state, I should never have held with you this wine to those about us, wishing the same fellow-conversation. Germany is Germany: she ought ship and conviviality to others: but to enlarge to have nothing political in common with what is the circle would disturb and deaden its harmony. not Germany. Her freedom and security now We irrigate the ground in our gardens: the pub- demand that she celebrate the communion of the lic road may require the water equally: yet we Our country is the only one in all the give it rather to our borders; and first to those explored regions on earth that never has been conthat lie against the house! God himself did not quered. Arabia and Russia boast it falsely; fill the world at once with happy creatures: he France falsely; Rome falsely. A fragment off the enlivened one small portion of it with them, and empire of Darius fell and crushed her: Valenbegan with single affections, as well as pure and tinian was the footstool of Sapor, and Rome was unmixed. We must have an object and an aim, buried in Byzantium. Boys must not learn this, or our strength, if any strength belongs to us, will and men will not. Britain, the wealthiest and be useless. most powerful of nations, and, after our own, the most literate and humane, received from us colonies and laws. Alas! those laws, which she retains as her fairest heritage, we value not: we surrender them to gangs of robbers, who fortify themselves within walled cities, and enter into leagues against When they quarrel, they push us upon one another's sword, and command us to thank God for the victories that enslave us. These are the glories we celebrate; these are the festivals we hold, on the burial-mounds of our ancestors. Blessed are those who lie under them! blessed are also those who remember what they were, and call upon their names in the holiness of love. Kotzebue. There is much good sense in these remarks: but I am not at all times at leisure and in readiness to receive instruction. I am old enough to have laid down my own plans of life; and I trust I am by no means deficient in the relations I bear to society. Sandt. Lovest thou thy children? Oh! my heart bleeds! But the birds can fly; and the nest requires no warmth from the parent, no cover against the rain and the wind. Kotzebue. This is wildness: this is agony. Your face is laden with large drops; some of them tears, some not. Be more rational and calm, my dear young man! and less enthusiastic. Sandt. They who will not let us be rational, make us enthusiastic by force. Do you love your children? I ask you again. If you do, you must love them more than another man's. Only they who are indifferent to all, profess a parity. Kotzebue. Sir! indeed your conversation very much surprises me. Sandt. I see it does: you stare, and would look proud. Emperors and kings, and all but maniacs, would lose that faculty with me. I could speedily bring them to a just sense of their nothingness, unless their ears were calked and pitched, although I am no Savonarola. He too died sadly! Kotzebue. Amid so much confidence of power, and such an assumption of authority, your voice is gentle, almost plaintive. Sandt. It should be plaintive. Oh, could it but be persuasive! Kotzebue. Why take this deep interest in me? I do not merit nor require it. Surely anyone would think we had been acquainted with each other for many years. Sandt. What! should I have asked you such a question as the last, after long knowing you? Kotzebue (aside). This resembles insanity. Sandt. The insane have quick ears, sir, and sometimes quick apprehensions. us. Kotzebue. Moderate the transport that inflames and consumes you. There is no dishonour in a nation being conquered by a stronger. Sandt. There may be great dishonour in letting it be the stronger; great, for instance, in our disunion. Kotzebue. We have only been conquered by the French in our turn. Sandt. No, sir, no: we have not been, in turn or out. Our puny princes were disarmed by promises and lies: they accepted paper crowns from the very thief who was sweeping into his hat their forks and spoons. A cunning traitor snared incautious ones, plucked them, devoured them, and slept upon their feathers. Kotzebue. I would rather turn back with you to the ancient glories of our country than fix my attention on the sorrowful scenes more near to us. We may be justly proud of our literary men, who unite the suffrages of every capital, to the exclusion of almost all their own. Sandt. Many Germans well deserve this honour, others are manger-fed and hirelings. Kotzebue. The English and the Greeks are the only nations that rival us in poetry, or in any works of imagination. Sandt. While on this high ground we pretend to a rivalship with England and Greece, can we reflect without a sinking of the heart on our inferiority in political and civil dignity? Why are we lower than they? Our mothers are like their mothers; our children are like their children; our limbs are as strong, our capacities are as enlarged; our desire of improvement in the arts and sciences is neither less vivid and generous, nor less temperate and well-directed. The Greeks were under disadvantages which never bore in any degree on us; yet they rose through them vigorously and erectly. They were Asiatic in what ought to be the finer part of the affections; their women were veiled and secluded, never visited the captive, never released the slave, never sat by the sick in the hospital, never heard the child's lesson repeated in the school. Ours are more tender, compassionate, and charitable, than poets have feigned of the past, or prophets have announced of the future; and, nursed at their breasts and educated at their feet, blush we not at our degeneracy? The most indifferent stranger feels a pleasure at finding, in the worst-written history of Spain, her various kingdoms ultimately mingled, although the character of the governors, and perhaps of the governed, is congenial to few. What delight then must overflow on Europe, from seeing the mother of her noblest nation rear again her venerable head, and bless all her children for the first time united! Kotzebue. I am bound to oppose such a project. Sandt. Say not so: in God's name, say not so. Kotzebue. In such confederacy I see nothing but conspiracy and rebellion, and I am bound, I tell you again, sir, to defeat it, if possible. Sandt. Bound! I must then release you. Kotzebue. How should you, young gentleman, release me? Sandt. May no pain follow the cutting of the knot. But think again: think better: spare me! Kotzebue. I will not betray you. Sandt. That would serve nobody: yet, if in your opinion betraying me could benefit you or your family, deem it no harm; so much greater has been done by you in abandoning the cause of Germany. Here is your paper; here is your ink. Kotzebue. Do you imagine me an informer? Sandt. From maxims and conduct such as yours, spring up the brood, the necessity, and the occupation of them. There would be none, if good men thought it a part of goodness to be as active and vigilant as the bad. I must go, sir! Return to yourself in time! How it pains me to think of losing you! Be my friend! Kotzebue. I would be. Sandt. Be a German ! Kotzebue. I am. Sandt, (having gone out). Perjurer and profaner! Yet his heart is kindly. I must grieve for him! Away with tenderness! I disrobe him of the privilege to pity me or to praise me, as he would have done had I lived of old. Better men shall do more. God calls them: me too he calls: I will enter the door again. May the greater sacrifice bring the people together, and hold them evermore in peace and concord. The lesser victim follows willingly. (Enters again.) Turn! die! (strikes.) Alas! alas! no man ever fell alone. How many innocent always perish with one guilty! and writhe longer! Unhappy children! I shall weep for you elsewhere. Some days are left me. In a very few the whole of this little world will lie between us. I have sanctified in you the memory of your father. Genius but reveals dishonour, commiseration covers it THE CARDINAL-LEGATE ALBANI AND PICTURE-DEALERS. MARCHESE SCAMPA, CONTE BIANCHERIA, SIGNOR CORAZZA, CARDINAL-LEGATE ALBANI. Legate. Most illustrious Signor Marchese! I grieve deeply to have incommoded you. Most illustrious Signor Conte Cesare! I am sorry to have caused you any disturbance. Most esteemed, prized, and ornamented Signor Corazza! I feel somewhat of uneasiness at requiring your attend ance. Scampa. Your Eminence may dispose of me purely at Her pleasure. Biancheria. I am your Eminence's most obsequious, most devoted, and most humble servant. Corazza. I kiss the sacred hem of her purple, humbly inclining myself. Legate. On my faith, Signors! a pretty piece of pastry you have been making! A fine embroilment! on my body! Scampa. Eminence! all men have had their embroilments. Biancheria. Pieces of pastry all men have made, Eminence! Legate. Signors! I fear these will stick upon your fingers some time yet, although I pray God you may, with his help, wash yourselves clean. Scampa. We are in his hands. Biancheria. And your Eminence's. Scampa. I meant Hers all the while. Corazza. Surely; securely! I am in Hers, the whole of me. Legate. 'Tis well. Now in the name of Dominedio, most gentle sirs, how could you play these tricks? What doings are these! I accuse you of nothing: I am convinced you are innocent, most innocent, more than most innocent. And yet, diamene! they will have it otherwise. Scampa. God and your Eminence with us, our uprightness is not to be disputed. Biancheria. We know what we know: we are what we are we can tell them that. Let them mind it. What says Signor Marchese? Do I speak well? Scampa. True; most true; Signor Conte! always under the correction of his Eminence. Legate. Forasmuch as I have understanding in me, there are not two honester gentlemen in Bologna. Very old houses! vastly rich heretofore: rich still. Honey does not run from the pot without leaving some against the sides; ay, Signor Marchese? (Aside.) It sticks hard; but I have a spoon that will scrape it. You appear to be incommoded by a cough, Signor Marchese! Will my snuff-box relieve it? Scampa. Infinite thanks, Eminence! immortal condescension! It would cure Cairo: it would have stopt the seven plagues of Egypt. Legate. Signor Conte! we are coming to the business. Pardon my habits of despatch! Only be explicit; be clear: I must do my duty : I may be lenient. Much is left to my judgment and discretion; and you noble personages are the very last in the world who would wish to lead it astray, or make it harsh. Biancheria. There are common laws and common lawyers in Bologna, blessed be his Holiness! And nothing new about them, nothing wild and extravagant, nothing visionary. They are ancient and awful as our Garisenda, and, like Garisenda, lean toward the inhabitants. Scampa. Talk of patriotism! this I call patriotism. We can buy injustice of any tribunal in Italy, and at a reasonable price it would be hard indeed if we can not buy justice for a little more, in proportion to the rarity, and if we are forced to go beyond our native country for this greatest benefit of a paternal government. I should be sorry to prefer any on earth to my own Bologna, blest as it is with the rule and guidance of the Prince of the Apostles, but more immediately under his delegate the Holiness of our Lord, Leo the Twelfth, now sitting and reigning, and worthily and plenarily represented by your Eminence. But, Eminence! (pardon me if I sob aloud and beat my breast at saying it) there are countries, yes, there are countries in our Italy, where insolent Englishmen are thrown utterly into the shade, their audacity rising beyond endurance. One of them, believe me, had the temerity to take the wall of Don Neri Corsini, a An English gentleman, with more earnestness Roman prince, a prime minister. Nobly and than . . All at once. As usual with the nation. Legate. has applied to me personally. Scampa. Personally! to a Porporato! Biancheria. Personally! to a Cardinal-Legate! Corazza. Ohibo! Personally! to an Eminence of Holy Church! with a maggiorduomo, four cooks, six chaplains, and (Sant Antonio) the six finest mules in all the Patrimony! Cospetto! the heretic! Legate. So it is: by letter to me, I mean. Biancheria. Secretary, even secretary, had been too high. Maestro di casa, maestro di scuderia, cameriere, page, porter, or any other dignitary of the household, might have received it in the first instance, under the form of supplication. But letter! letter! letter! my head turns round with it. Scampa. Carbonaro ! Corazza. Giovane Italia! disguised as an Englishman. Scampa. Eminence! we are gallant men, men of honour, men of garb, and Her most obsequious. Some regards are due to persons of distinction. Why should he trouble your Eminence with his concerns? petty matters! trifles! trivialities! Law indeed to an Englishman is like his native air he flies to it as he flies to his ship; he loses his appetite if he misses it: and he never thinks he has enough of it until it has fairly stript him and begins to lie heavy on his stomach. It is his tea, his plum-pudding, his punch, his nightcap. Legate. Happy! if he can throw it off so easily when he wakens. Law in England ought to be in capital condition, if exercise can accomplish it. worthily did his Highness treat this sacrilege. Legate. I am uninterested in the event: excuse my interruption. Scampa. Condescend to listen. The proud Englishman had bought a villa and a couple of farms under Fiesole; rooting up olives, cutting down vines, the madman! A Frenchman was his neighbour. He had a right to the waste water of the proud Englishman's fountain. The proud Englishman, in his spite and malignity, not only shaved every morning, and ordered all his men servants, to the number of five, to shave also just as frequently, but he washed his hands and face several times in the day, and especially at that season when water is most wanted. In like manner did all his children, four of them ; and all four bathed all four, Eminence! all four! every day! the malignant father setting them the example. Legate. Heretics and Turks are much addicted to bathing. It might be superstition, or it might be an idea of cleanliness. The English are malicious one against another, almost universally, but toward foreigners there appears to be more contemptuousness than malice. Scampa. Your Eminence has the eye upon the key-hole, and sees the whole chamber. Pride and malice, the right side and the left side of the Devil, constitute the Englishman. O the persecutor! This, the very worst of them all, excepting the wretch who would, in the presence of your Eminence, deflower the fair fame of innocent men like me, this one committed the injury through wanton extravagance, shaving, washing, bathing, beside watering two hundred orange, lemon, citron trees, and then laurels and myrtles and rhododendrons and magnolias, and fantas tical outlandish flowers innumerable. No wonder with more variations than ever were composed there was little waste water. The Frenchman by Rossini. It was decided from the beginning cited him before the tribunals. At first they that some should be won and some lost, and that favored the Englishman, as was intended. The at last all the costs should be cast upon this Frenchman, as Frenchmen always do, shifted his proud Englishman. The whole property of his ground a little, and won the second cause. In adversary amounts not to the sum expended in the third the Englishman had his turn, to prove the maintenance of what he presumed to call his the fairness of processes in Tuscany. Then a rights: a favorite word, Eminence, with those couple of the judges were persuaded to see their islanders. He was a true Englishman, unbending error, and voted on the contrary side. Presently to authority, repulsive to rank, and bearing an more had their eyes opened for them. In vain abominable dash of charcoal on his shoulders, did the proud Englishman hold in contempt the black, black as Satanasso. He would not have variations of the opponent and the judges: in gained his lawsuit even if he had consented to vain, over and over, did he offer tenfold the value pay down the fair market-price, which his proud of the water, supposing the water was the thing stomach would never do. But we are ready, Emiwanted, which the Frenchman had delared he nence, we are ready; for no men alive observe never cared about, having plenty on each side of more strictly the usages of their fathers. We his house. No, this would never serve the pur- hate revolutionary notions, we hate false docpose of those who patted him on the back. His trines: honour and religion, and love of our suit assumed a somewhat different form, term neighbour, is our motto. after term, otherwise it could not easily have been so protracted. Nothing was now left for the proud Englishman but appeal to the last resort; but, just before the defection of the two favorable judges was decided on and arranged, Scampa. I call that a happy country whose the Court of Appeal in the last resort was pur- law is as movable as Easter, and as managable posely suppressed. Such was the fate of the and pleasant as the Carnival. If it is not so in proud Englishman and his waste water. the states of the Church, where upon earth ought Legate. I hope, Signor Marchese, that the mat-it to be? I pay to His Holiness fifteen Roman ter ends here; for you must remember that I crowns yearly, for dispensation to eat flesh in have other business in hand. Lent.* Scampa. Patience, Eminence, patience! It does not end here, nor could it reasonably. This arrogant infuriated man, this devastator of vines and olives, this substituter of grass and moss for cabbages and onions, was sentenced to construct with efficient masonry a competent reservoir in front and within ten paces of his hall-door. Such a sentence, if such a sentence had been possible against a noble Tuscan, would have broken the heart of Conte Gherardesca, the late proprietor, although he resided there but seldom, and enjoyed but few perhaps of the cabbages and onions so unworthily supplanted. Just punishment for this overbearing pertinacious Englishman! reminding him for ever of what is due to a Roman prince and prime minister; such a diplomatist that he had the honour of serving both his native sovereign the Granduke Ferdinand and the Emperor Napoleon at the same time, enjoying the countenance of each, unsuspected by the other. And a shining countenance it was. Faith of Bacchus it was an omelet well fried on each side, and enough of it to fatten a Carthusian. Legate. To what does this tend, Signor Marchese? Scampa. It tends, Eminence, to prove satisfactorily the small regard entertained for Englishmen in other quarters of our Italy: it tends to prove, above all things, their contempt of dignities, and how easily, by the grace of your Eminence, they may be disappointed in their extravagant recourse to litigation. The litigant was condemned to a series of lawsuits for nine years, Legate. I wish so great a hardship had befallen no better man than the person you describe: but, remember, I am not sitting here to examine the merits of his case. We have our own laws. Legate. You seem strong and healthy, most Illustrious ! Scampa. Under the blessing of heaven, by paying the fifteen crowns I continue so. If all would do the same their sins would fall off them as the scales fall from a leper. Ling may help to lift a man out of Purgatory; but Roman crowns, legitimate and unclipt, can alone pave the way to Paradise. I am no niggard, no Englishman: right well do I know, and more especially do I acknowledge, that His Holiness is not only an apostle, but a prince, and that His dignity is to be duly supported by all true Christians. I glory in being one; and God forbid I should ever be so straitened in circumstances for want of protection, as to cry out for an abatement. In Tuscany the judges will hear reason, when the wand of the apparitor is tipped with gold and the litigant speaks in French. It is better he should speak it first to Don Neri, who understands it perfectly. Legate. I do entreat you, Signor Marchese, to come at once to the point. Scampa. I would gladly, triumphantly, extatically, shed the last drop of my blood for His Holiness; but, ohibo! what is all a man's blood worth when it is robbed of its vital heat, of its menestra, its fry, and its roast? I am a good subject, a good Catholic, true, faithful, vigilant; I am a gallant man, a brave man; but I have my fears. A family, however healthy, may obtain it at that price, and some very pious ones do. |