Immediately upon that, the Minister von Schleunes, in a congratulatory letter, pressed upon Clotilda's parents the quarter-wing of his house, and was happy, in the epistle, "that a higher petition had repeated his own with such effect." I set up this nobleman as a model to all people of the world; although, at present, all writes itself noble in the moral, as the Viennese do in the heraldic sense.

Victor, who with his soul's eyes was peeping all day long into the Chamberlain's window, could hardly wait to see Clotilda, first in St. Luna, and next at court. He put off the visit from day to day, and night after night made it in dream. Not even his visiting-card—his letter to the Parson—had he sent off; he wanted, not only to carry it, but actually to supersede it, himself. But this, last thought—of suppressing the letter, for fear Clotilda might possibly get hold of this malicious conduct-list of courts, and therefrom contract a repugnance to the new office—he hurled forthwith out of his soul, as Paul did the viper from his hand. Woe to the heart that is not sincere towards a sincere one, is not great towards a great one, and warm towards a warm one, when it should be all this even towards one that is nothing of it all!

For the rest, he needed such a visit, and such a reciprocal visit, every day more and more; for he was not happy; and for this there were, besides himself, to blame, first, the Prince, secondly, Flamin, thirdly, nine thousand and thirty-seven persons. The Prince could not well help it; he poured out the whole cornucopia of his love on the Doctor, and took away from him all the freedom which the latter had been minded in the beginning so sacredly to maintain. Victor shook his head as often as he wrote in his journal, or log-book of his voyage of life, (at his father's behest,) and saw by his chart that he had passed over quite other seas and degrees of latitude and longitude than he or his father had desired. "However, I shall land right, at least," said he.—

But his Flamin brought still more sadness to his soul, which everywhere at once sought and bestowed love. He wanted to impart to the Counsellor, with the news of Clotilda's appointment, a joy like his own; but his friend received it as coldly as he did its bearer. The dust of law-papers lay thick on the organ-pipes of his spirits.—Chained to the session- and writing-tables, he was now, like chained dogs, wilder than he had been before when unfettered.—The efforts of his colleagues to dislocate the body politic into an anagram did not get from him the approbation which they deserved.—Then, too, there lodged itself in his soul the leaven of the jealousy of friendship, which could not feel it right that his Victor should see him seldomer and others oftener.[[214]]—But most was he affronted by Victor's refusal, when he besought his company to St. Luna.... In a word, he was vexed.

The nine thousand and thirty-seven men who were to my hero nine thousand and thirty-seven tormenting spirits are the gentlemen of Flachsenfingen jointly and severally, by means of their absurd character, which deserves not to be sketched here, but in an extra flyleaf.

EXTRA FLY-LEAF,

Wherein is sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,—or Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna.

Little Vienna is the name many give to my Flachsenfingen, just as we have a Little Leipsic, Little Paris,[[215]] &c. There can hardly, however, be two cities wider apart in manners than Flachsenfingen, where one gluts and drowns his life and his soul, and Vienna, where one, perhaps, does not sufficiently shun the opposite fault of a Spartan asceticism. The Little-Viennese, or Flachsenfingeners, open their hearts to the enjoyment of Nature far less than the orifice of the stomach.—Pastures are the kitchen-pieces of their cattle, and gardens those of the owners thereof; the Milky Way does not chain and satisfy their spirits half so much (though it is longer) as the Königsberg sausage of 1583 would have done, which was five hundred and ninety-six ells long, and four times as heavy as the learned man himself who has portrayed it to posterity,—Herr Wagenseil.[[216]]—Are these the traits upon which carriers ground the name of Little Vienna? I have often been in Great Vienna, and am personally acquainted with the grand crosses, little crosses, and commanders of the Order of Temperance, which is there so common. I can certainly, therefore, represent a valid witness, and must be believed, when I say, that, while in Little Vienna they guzzle extraordinarily, of Great Vienna, and emphatically of its cloister-people, I can and must maintain something very different: they have not only all the time the greatest thirst,—which certainly must needs be gone, if they quenched it,—but they also make use, against drunkenness, of a fine method of Plato's. That ancient advises us, in case of drunkenness, to look into a glass, in order, by the distorted figure therein which reminds us of our desecration, to be forever warned away from the vice. Hence whole chapters, the dean, the sub-senior, the junior canons, &c., often set vessels full of wine or beer before them, and lift them to their eyes, and in this metamorphotic or caricaturing glass, which, by shaking, distorts still more the distorted features, contemplate themselves, according to the philosopher's advice, a good long while. I ask whether people who peer so deeply into the glass can love drinking?—

It does not, however, follow from this, that I deny the Great-Viennese a resemblance to the Flachsenfingeners, in such traits as do honor. Thus, for example, I must gladly allow a similarity of the former to the latter in this respect, that they, neither of them, are ever down with the disease of poetry or enthusiasm or sentimentalism,—which are all one. Victor would make this eulogy sound in his language somewhat thus: "The Viennese authors (even the best of them, only Denis and hardly three others excepted) give the reader no wings to bear him up over the whole world of the actual by that nobility of soul, by that contempt of the earth, by that reverence for old virtue and freedom and the higher love, wherein other German geniuses shine as in holy rays."[[217]] And he would refer for proof to the "Vienna Sketches," to "Faustin,"[[218]] to Blumauer,[[219]] and to the "Vienna Almanac of the Muses." This reproach even a Viennese would accept and turn to his credit, by asking us whether we have to show (like him) a "Musen-Almanach," with a sediment of filth, whereupon one might write, "With approbation of the brothel."—This feeling of literary difference compelled even a Nicolai,—otherwise no special amoroso of the Vienna authors,—in his "Universal German Library," to build up for them a separate side-box, although he throws writers of all other German circles together into one parterre, or pit. In like manner have I seen in Bavaria, on the gallows, beside the usual post for the three Christian fellow-confessors, a special schismatic cross-beam attached, to which only the Jew tribe were strung up.

The Flachsenfingener knows that there is nothing in poets; and in books, where rills of verse run through the prose, he skips clean over the rills, just as certain people come late to church in order to escape the singing. He is a true servant of the state, who knows of what use the poetic golden vein is in the revision-, commission-, relation-, and enrolling-systems,—none at all; meanwhile, although he cannot appreciate a Klopstock or a Goethe, nevertheless he will not, in his leisure hours, despise a doggerel verse or crambo-rhyme. A soul of such a fortunate, robust nature, wherein one aims less to exalt his spirit than his income, makes it, to be sure, comprehensible how there may be a kine-pox, by means of which the Flachsenfingener has been able, like Socrates, to wander round alone in the plague of sentimentalism without being infected. The full moon produced with them full crabs, but no full hearts; and what they planted under it, that it might favor the growth, was not love, but—turnips. The genuine Little-Viennese shoots at much nearer targets than that white one over yonder. They marry there with true gusto, without having first shot themselves or sighed themselves to death,—they know no obstacles to love but ecclesiastical,—female virtue is a belt-buckle, which must hold as long as the surname of the daughter,—the hearts of daughters are there like letter-envelopes, which, when they have once been superscribed to one lord, can easily be turned so as to be addressed to another man,—the girls love there, not from coquetry, but from simplicity, any devil, except poor devils....