The other States of the Confederation
did not abandon Napoleon until after he was completely beaten at Leipzig;
and Austria refused to accede to the coalition until a carte blanche was
given her to help herself in Italy.
Let every impartial man therefore review the whole of this proceeding and
then say whether the King of Saxony, so proverbial for his probity, so
adored by his subjects, deserved to be insulted by such an unfeeling letter
as that of Castlereagh. No! the King of Saxony better deserves to reign
than any King of them all. Would they had even a small share of his
virtues! Another proof and a still stronger one of the great integrity and
honor of this excellent Prince, is, that when Napoleon offered to mediatize
in his favor the various ducal Houses in Saxony, such as Weimar, Gotha,
Cobourg, etc., and to annex these countries to his dominions, he declined
the offer. Would Prussia, Austria, or Hanover have been so scrupulous?
The young ladies here, tho' well versed and delighting in various branches
of litterature, cannot overcome that strong national propensity to tales
and romances wherein the terrific and supernatural abounds; in all their
romances accordingly this taste prevails strongly; nay, even in some of the
romances, where the scene is laid in later times, there is some such
anachronism as the story of a spectre.
I recollect reading a novel, the scene of which is laid in Italy about the
time of the battle of Marengo, wherein a ghost is introduced who
contributes mainly to the unravelling of the piece. A young lady here of
considerable talent and of general information confessed to me, when I
asked her, what subjects pleased her most in the way of reading, that
nothing gave her so much delight as "Geistergeschichten." Lewis' romance
of "The Monk" is a great favorite in Germany.[128] By the bye, his
poetical tale of Alonzo and Imogen is evidently taken from a similar
subject in the Volks-maehrchen.
The weather has set in very cold and the Elbe is nearly frozen over. It is
impossible to go out of the house without a Pelz or cloak lined with fur;
for otherwise, on leaving a room heated by a stove, the effect of the cold
is almost instantaneous and brings on an ague fit. This I attribute to the
excessive heat kept up in the rooms and houses by the stoves. As smoking is
so prevalent here, this contributes much also to keeping the body in a
praeternatural heat and rendering it still more obnoxious to cold on
removal from a room to the open air. It has been remarked by a medical
author, in the Russian campaign in 1812, that the soldiers of the southern
nations and provinces, viz., Provencaux, Gascons, Italians, Spaniards, and
Portuguese, endured the cold much better and suffered less from it than the
Germans and Hollanders.
