‘Be it so,’ said the Hofrath, as he made signs to the madchen that he would cast his skin. ‘Ich bin dabei (I ‘m ready).’
‘Wi’ tippenny we fear nae evil;
Wi’ usquebaugh we ‘d face the devil,’
quoth Burns; and surely Tarn’s knowledge of human nature took a wide circuit when he uttered those words. The whole philosophy of temptation is comprised in the distich, and the adage of coming up ‘to a man’s price’ has no happier illustration; and certainly, had the poet been a Bursche in Germany, he could not have conveyed the ‘sliding scale’ of professors’ agreeability under a more suitable formula. He who would be civil with a pipe becomes communicative with coffee, and brotherly with beer; but he opens every secret of his nature under the high-pressure power of a flask of Rhenish. The very smack of the Hofrath’s lips as he drained his glass to the bottom, and then exclaimed in a transport, ‘Er ist zum küssen, der Wein!’ announced that the folding-doors of his heart stood wide open, and that he might enter who would.
‘Rosenthaler was Goethe’s favourite,’ quoth Stromeyer; ‘and he had a good taste in wine.’
‘Your great folk,’ said Hausman, ‘ever like to show some decided preference to one vintage above the rest; Napoleon adopted chambertin, Joseph the Second drank nothing but tokay, and Peter the Great found brandy the only fluid to his palate.’
‘A plague on their fancies!’ interrupted old Blumenbach. ‘Let us have the story!’
‘Ah, well, well,’ said the Hofrath, throwing up his eyes with an air of sentimentalism, ‘so you shall. Love’s young dream was sweet, after all! We were in the Hartz,’ continued he, at once springing into his story with a true Demosthenic abruptness—‘we were in the Hartz Mountains, making a little tour, for it was semester, and all the classes were closed in the University. There was Tieck, and Feldtbourg the Dane, and Upsal, and old Langendorf of Jena, and Grotchen von Zobelschein, and Mina Upsal, and Caroline, and Martha there—she, poor thing, was getting deaf at the time, and could not take the same pleasure as the rest of us. She was always stupid, you know.’
Here he looked over at her, when she immediately responded—
‘Yes, yes, what he says is true.’
‘Each morning we used to set off up the mountains, botanising and hammering among the limestone rocks, and seeking for cryptogamia and felspar, lichens and jungermannia and primitive rock—mingling our little diversions with pleasant talk about the poets, and reciting verses to one another from Hans Sachs and the old writers, and chatting away about Schiller: the “Lager” was just come out, and more than one among us could scarcely believe it was Frederick did it.