geon, all the regular-approved instruments of torture, from the wheel to the pincers, are still religiously preserved. A number of iron hooks are fixed in the ceil. ing; a corresponding block of wood runs across the floor, filled with sharp pieces of iron pointing upwards; in a corner were mouldering the ropes by which prisoners used to be suspended by the wrists from the hooks, with their feet resting on the iron points below. At the side of the wheel is a pit of exquisitely cold water. The benches and table of the judges still retain their place, as well as the old-fa shioned iron candlestick, which, even at mid-day, furnished the only light that rendered visible the darkness of this "cell of guilt and misery." Fortunately, the dust has now settled thick upon them, never, let us hope, to be disturbed. The worst of all is, that this species of torture (for, considering what sort of imprisonment it is, and for what purpose it is inflicted, I can give it no other name,) is just of that kind which works most surely on the least corrupted. To the master-spirits of villany, and long-tried servants of iniquity, a dark, damp hole, wet straw, and bread and water, are much less appalling than to the novice in their trade, or to the innocent man, against whom fortuitous circumstances have directed suspicion. How many men have burdened themselves with crimes which they never committed, to escape torture which they never deserved! What a melancholy catalogue might be collected out of the times when the torture was still in flicted by the executioner! And, alas! very recent experience robs us of the satisfaction of believing they have disappeared, now that Germany has substituted for the rack so excruciating a confineA lamentable instance happened in Dresden while I was there, (1821.) Kügelchen, the most celebrated German painter of his day, had been murdered and robbed in the neighbourhood of the city. A soldier, of the name of Fischer, was apprehended on suspicion. After a long investigation, his judges found reason to be clearly satisfied of his guilt; but still, as he did not confess, he was sent to the dungeon, to conquer his obstinacy. He stood it out for some months, but at last acknowledged the murder. He had not yet been broken on the wheel, when circumstances came out which pointed suspicion against another soldier, named Kalkofen, as having been at least an accomplice in the deed. The result of the new inquiry was, the clearest proof of Fischer's total innocence. Kalkofen voluntarily confessed, not only that he was the murderer of Kügelchen, but that he ment. had committed likewise a similar crime, which had occurred some months before, and the perpetrator of which had not hitherto been discovered. The miscreant was executed, and the very same judges who had subjected the unhappy Fischer to such a confinement, to extort a confession, now liberated him, cleared from every suspicion. As the natural consequence of such durance in such an abode, he had to be carried from the prison to the hospital. He said, that he made his false confession, merely to be released, even by hastening his execution, from this pining torture which preys equally on the body and the mind. This is the most frightful side of their criminal justice. It may be allowed, that there are few instances of the innocent actually suffering on the scaffold; such examples are rare in all countries: though it is clear that, in Germany, the guiltless must often owe his escape to accident, while the law has done every thing in its power to condemn him. But even of those who have at length been recognized as innocent, and restored to character and society, how many, like poor Fischer, have carried with them, from their prison, the seeds of disease, which have ultimately conducted them to the grave as certainly as the gibbet or the wheel! Our author next visits Cassel, and is naturally led to speak of the defunct kingdom of Westphalia. The only thing particularly calling for notice in the account of Hanover, which our author next visited, is the University of Göttingen, the greatest living ornament of which, now that Heyné is dead, is Professor Blumenbach. Europe has placed Blumenbach at the head of her physiologists; but, with all his profound learning, he is in every thing the reverse of the dull, plodding, cumbersome solidity, which we have learned to consider as inseparable from a German savant, a most ignorant and unfounded prejudice. Göthe is the greatest poet, Wolff the greatest philologist, and Blumenbach the greatest natural historian of Germany; yet it would be dif. ficult to find three more jocular and enBlumenbach has not an tertaining men. atom of academical pedantry or learned obscurity; his conversation is a series of shrewd and mirthful remarks on any thing that comes uppermost, and such, likewise, I have heard it said, is sometimes his lecture. Were it not for the chaos of skulls, skeletons, mummies, and other materials of his art, with which he is surrounded, you would not easily discover, unless you brought him purposely on the subject, that he had studied natural history. He sits among all sorts of odd things, which an ordinary person would call lumber, and which even many of those who drive his own science could not make much of; for it is one of Blumenbach's excellencies, that he contrives to make use of every thing, and to find proofs and illustrations where no other person would think of looking for them. By the side of a drawing which represented some Botocuda Indians, with faces like baboons, cudgelling each other, hung a portrait of the beautiful Agnes of Mansfeld. A South-American skull, the lowest degree of human conformation, grinned at a Grecian skull, which the professor reckons the perfection of crania. Here stood a whole mummy from the Canary Islands, there half a one from the Brazils, with long strings through its nose, and covered with gaudy feathers, like Papageno in the Magic Flute. Here is stuck a negro's head, there lies a Venus, and yonder reclines, in a corner, a contemplative skeleton with folded hands. Yet it is only necessary to hear the most passing remarks of the Professor, as you stumble after him through this apparent confusion, to observe how clearly all that may be learned from it is arranged in his head, in his own scientific combinations. The only thing that presented external order, was a very complete collection of skulls, showing the fact, by no means a new one, that there is a gradual progression in the form of the skull, from apes, up to the most generally received models of human beauty. "Do you see these horns ?" said he, searching among a heap of oddities, and drawing forth three horns; "they were once worn by a woman. She happened to fall and break her head; from the wound sprouted this long horn; it continued to grow for thirty years, and then she cast it; it dropped off. In its place came a second one; but it did not grow so long, and dropped off too. Then this third one, all on the same spot; but the poor woman died while the third was growing, and I had it cut from the corpse." They were literary three genuine horns. The last two are short, thick, and nearly straight; but the first is about ten inches long, and completely twisted, like the horn of a ram. It is round and rough, of a brownish colour, and fully half an inch in diameter to wards the root. All three are hollow, at least at the base. The termination is blunt and rounded. Other instances of the same thing have been known, but always in women; and Blumenbach says it has been ascertained by chemical analysis, that such horns have a greater affinity, in their composition, with the horns of the rhinoceros, than with those of any other animal. From Hanover our author proceeds to Brunswick, of which we meet with nothing new, and thence to Berlin, which is fully described. Here he finds the King very popular, and indulges his chivalrous propensities in gathering every anecdote of the late Queen that fell in his way, and in fervent execrations against the unmanly and unjustifiable calumnies circulated against her by the late Emperor of France, and his creatures. Louisa appears to have been no less distinguished by her virtues than by her personal beauty and accomplishments; she was greatly beloved by the people, who cherish her memory with the most affectionate attachment; but was better qualified to shine in the domestic circle, of which she was the ornament, than to figure as a Queen. At the same time, it ought to be mentioned, that after the disastrous battle of Auerstadt, and the virtual subversion of the monarchy, she seems to have been the only person about the court who, gathering "resolution from despair," tried to predicted that the power by which rally the public spirit, and boldly the country was oppressed would not last. Accordingly, when the fortune of war turned the tide of victory once more in favour of the allies, and hurled back upon France the vengeance she had so often inflicted, her name became a watchword with the infuriated soldiery, and on the occasion of any new victory, their exclamation of unavailing regret, was, "SHE has not lived to see it!" As to Frederick William himself, he appears to be a good enough sort of footing with his people, and ready man, living on an easy and familiar to indulge them in any thing except constitution, for neither of which, if a free press and a representative we may believe our author, have they any inordinate desires. Our author gives an amusing detail of the circumstances which led to the establishment of the Univer sity of Berlin, the great ornament of which is Wolff; Wolff himself is the best known of its members, a most erudite, and friendly, and entertaining person; full of Greek, but still fuller of good humour and jocularity, and overflowing with remark and anecdote, the result of a long life spent in constant communication with all the great characters, not merely of Germany, but of many foreign countries. Notwithstanding his learning and fame, no man can be farther removed from pedantry and pride, and, like Blumenbach, he hates nothing so much as erudite dulness. You cannot converse with him half an hour, without finding out that he is a clever and entertaining man; but you may converse with him for months without finding out that he is, if not the first, assuredly among the first scholars of his day. The first work he published was a translation of the Fatal Curiosity, to which he prefixed a Dissertation on the Drama, written in English. It was published anonymously, and the German reviewers took it into their heads, that it must be the production of some English language master, who wished to give a specimen of his acquirements in both tongues. Accordingly, they found the English part of the book to be excellently well written, and declared that the German part betrayed at once the pen of a foreigner, who had but an imperfect acquaintance with the language! He once proposed to execute a translation of Homer, in which not only word should be rendered for word, but foot for foot, and caesura for caesura. A few specimens of it have been printed in the third volume of his Analecta. He began with the Odyssey, translated about an hundred lines, and finding the labour too great, and the gain too small, freed himself by demanding eighteen rix-dollars for every verse, a price which he knew well nobody could pay. One verse cost him too weeks. He succeeded best when travelling, and boasts of having translated a whole line and a half during a journey to Hamburgh, an effect of motion which he first learned from Klopstock. He is best known among scholars by the Prolegomena to his Homer, which have placed him at the head of classical sceptics. The doctrines maintained in this celebrated Introduction were far from being altogether new; but Wolff was the first who gave them a connected and systematic form, and propped them with an extent of erudition, and an acuteness of remark, which the orthodox believers in the antiquity, purity, and unity of the Homeric poems will not easily get over. The doctrines of the new sect, however, have not yet made great progress. "If twenty persons understand them in Germany," says the Professor himself, "probably twenty-one understand them in England; but I am quite sure, that in less than two hundred years, every body will understand them, and believe them, too." He avers, that the English bishops are to blame for the little progress his creed has made in this country, although Wood's Essay was the first important statement of its general tenor. The matter stands thus: Certain German theologians, adopting principles which, in regard to Homer, Wolff has rendered it difficult to controvert, have applied them to the sacred records, (of the Old Testament,) and arrived at the same conclusions. Believing themselves to have proved that the art of writing was unknown at the time when many of these books were penned, and that they descended from one generation to another only through the medium of oral tradition, they infer, that such a traditionary preservation is irreconcileable, from its very nature, with the continued authenticity and purity of the text. "Your bishops," says Wolff, "know this; they are sharp enough to see the consequences which must follow, if the principles be once admitted, and therefore they proscribe my prolegomena." Yet the prolegomena have been reprinted in one of the university editions (I think the Oxford) of Ernesti's Homer! But the most important, as well as the most interesting information, contained in this part of the work, is that which relates to the administration of Prince Hardenberg, which has certainly been productive of incalculable benefit to Prussia. It is truly astonishing what prodigious innovations are sometimes effected by the determined enemies of all change. Let the reader attend to what follows: He received Prussia stripped of half its extent, its honours blighted, its finances ruined, its resources at once exhausted by foreign contributions, and depressed by ancient relations among the different classes of society, which custom had consecrated, and selfishness was vehement to defend. He has left it to his King, enlarged in extent, and restored to its fame; with a well-ordered system of finance, not more defective or extravagant than the struggle for the redemption of the kingdom rendered necessary; and, above all, he has left it freed from those restraints which bound up the capacities of its industry, and were the sources at once of personal degradation and national poverty. Nor ought it to be forgotten that, while Hardenberg had often to contend, in the course of these reforms, now with the jealousies of town corporations, and now with the united influence and prejudices of the aristocracy, he stood in the difficult situation of a foreigner in the kingdom which he governed, unsupported by family descent or hereditary influence. His power rested on the personal confidence of the King in his talents and honesty, and the confidence which all of the people, who ever thought on such matters, reposed in the general spirit of his policy. It was on agriculture that Prussia had chiefly to rely, and the relations between the peasantry who laboured and the proprietors, chiefly of the nobility, who owned it, were of a most depressing nature. The most venturous of all Hardenberg's measures was, that by which he entirely new-modelled the system, and did nothing less than create a new order of independent landed proprietors. The Erbunterthänigkeit, or hereditary subjection of the peasantry to the proprietors of the estates on which they were born, had been already abolished by Stein: Next were removed the absurd restrictions which had so long operated, with accu. mulating force, to diminish the produc tiveness of land, by fettering the proprie. tor, not merely in the disposal, but even in the mode of cultivating his estate. Then came forth, in 1810, a royal edict, effecting, by a single stroke of the pen, a greater and more decisive change than has resulted from any modern legislative act, and one on which a more popular form of government would scarcely have ventured. It enacted, that all the pea santry of the kingdom should in future be free hereditary proprietors of the lands which hitherto they had held only as hereditary tenants, on condition that they gave up to the landlord a fixed proportion of them. The peasantry formed two classes. The first consisted of those who enjoyed what may be termed a hereditary lease, that is, who held lands to which the landlord was bound, on the death of the tenant in possession, to admit his successor, or, at least, some near relation. The right of the landlord was thus great ly inferior to that of unlimited property; he had not his choice of a tenant; the lease was likely to remain in the same family as long as the estate in his own; and, in general, he had not the power of increasing the rent, which had been originally fixed, centuries, perhaps, before, whether it consisted in produce or services. These peasants, on giving up onethird of their farms to the landlord, became unlimited proprietors of the remainder. The second class consisted of peasants whose title endured only for life, or a fixed term of years. In this case, the landlord was not bound to continue the lease, on its termination, to the former tenant, or any of his descendants; but still he was far from being unlimited proprietor; he was bound to replace the former tenant with a person of the same rank; he was prohibited to take the lands into his own possession, or cultivate them with his own capital. His right, however, was clearly more absolute than in the former case, and it is difficult to see what claim the tenant could set up beyond the endurance of his lease. That such restrictions rendered the estate less valuable to the proprietor, may have been a very good reason for abolishing them entirely, but seems to be no reason at all for taking a portion of the lands from him who had every right to them, to give it to him who had no right whatever, but that of possession under his temporary lease. But this class of peasants, too, (and they are supposed to have been by far the more numerous,) on giving up one-half of their farms, became absolute proprietors of the remainder. The half thus taken from the landlords, appears just to have been a price exacted from them for the more valuable enjoyment of the other ;-as if the government had said to them, Give up to our disposal a certain portion of your estates, and we shall so sweep away those old restrictions which render them unproductive to you, that what remains will speedily be as valuable as the whole was before. It cannot be denied, therefore, that this famous edict, especially in the latter of the two cases, was a very stern interference with the rights of private property; nor is it wonderful that those against whom it was directed should have sternly opposed it; but the minister was sterner still. He found the finances ruined, and the treasury attacked by demands, which required that the treasury should be filled; he saw the imperious necessity of rendering agriculture more productive; and though it may doubted, whether the same end might not have been gained by new. modelling the relations between the par. ties, as landlord and tenant, instead of stripping the former to create a new race of proprietors, there is no doubt at all as to the success of the measure, în increasing the productiveness of the soil. Even those of the aristocracy, who have waged war most bitterly against Hardenberg's reforms, allow that, in regard to agricul ture, this law has produced incredible good. "It must be confessed," says one of them, "that, in ten years, it has carried" us forward a whole century ;”— the best of all experimental proofs how injurious the old relations between the proprietors and labourers of the soil must have been to the prosperity of the country. The direct operation of this measure necessarily was to make a great deal of property change hands; but this effect was farther increased by its indirect operation. The law appeared at a moment when the greater part of the estates of the nobility were burdened with debts, and the proprietors were now deprived of their rentals. They indeed had land thrown back upon their hands; but this only multiplied their embarrassments. In the hands of their boors, the soil had been productive to them; now that it was in their own, they had neither skill nor capital to carry on its profitable cultivation, and new loans only added to the interest which already threatened to consume its probable fruits. The consequence of all this was, that, besides the portion of land secured in free property to the peasantry, much of the remainder came into the market, and the purchasers were generally persons who had acquired wealth by trade or manu factures. The sale of the royal domains, to supply the necessities of the state, operated powerfully in the same way. These domains always formed a most important item in the revenue of a German prince, and one which was totally independent of any controul, even that of the imperfectly constituted estates. In Prussia, they were estimated to yield annually nearly half a million Sterling, even in the hands of farmers, and, under the changes which have so rapidly augmented the value of the soil all over the kingdom, they would soon have become much more profitable. But, while compelled to tax severely the property of his subjects, the king refused to spare his own; and, in 1811, an edict was issued, authorizing the sale of the royal domains at twenty-five years' purchase of the estimated rental. These, too, passed into the hands of purchasers not connected with the aristocracy; for the aristocracy, so far from being able to purchase the estates of others, were selling their own estates to pay their debts. The party opposed to Hardenberg has not ceased to lament that the crown should thus have been shorn of its native and independent glories; ought to be powerful," say they," by its own revenues and possessions.” Our principles of government teach us a dif ferent doctrine. ❝ for it Beneficial as the economical effects of this division of property may have been, its political results are no less important. It has created a new class of citizens, and these the most valuable of all citi. zens; every trace, not merely of subjection, but of restraint, has been removed from the industrious, but poor and dcgraded peasants, and they have at once been converted into independent landed proprietors, resembling much the petits proprietaires created by the French Revolution. In Pomerania, for example, the estates of the nobility were calculated to contain 260 square miles; those of free proprietors, not noble, only five miles. Of the former, about 100 were Bauernhöfe, in the hands of the peasantry; and by the operation of the law, 60 of these would still remain the property of the boors who cultivated them. Thus there is now twelve times as much landed property, in this province, belong. ing to persons who are not noble, as there was before the appearance of this edict. The race of boors is not extinct; for the provisions of the law are not imperative, if both parties prefer remain. ing in their old relation; but this is a preference which, on the part of the peasant, at least, is not to be expected. Care has been taken that no new relations of the same kind shall be formed. A proprietor might settle his agricultu ral servants upon his grounds, giving them land instead of wages, and binding them to hereditary service; this would just have been the seed of a new race of boors to toil under the old personal services. Probably the thing had been attempted; for, in 1811, an edict appeared, which, while it allows the proprietor to pay his servants in whole or in part with the use of land, limits the duration of such a contract to twelve years. It prohibits him absolutely from giving these families land heritably, on condition of service; if a single acre is to be given in property, it must either be a proper sale, or a fixed rent must be stipulated in money or produce. Hardenberg was resolved that his measures should be complete. Wholesale reforms of this description could only take place in an absolute monarchy, where property and life are at the mercy of the Prince or his Ministers; but every thing in the shape of good, which mankind receive, from whatever hand, and for whatever purpose, tends directly to improve their condition, and to prepare their minds for asserting those rights, which none were so ready to concede as the Holy Allies, in the hour of their need, and which, however |