"Do you allude to that respectable gentleman, rather up in years, who seems to me to have swallowed verjuice after his coffee this morning, or to be labouring under a severe attack of toothache?"
"Irreverend young man! Know that is Ludwig Uhland."
"You don't mean to say that that crossgrained surly old fellow is the author of the famous ballads!" exclaimed I. "Why, there is a snarl on his visage that might qualify him to sit for a fancy portrait of Churchill in extreme old age!"
"He is the last of a great race. Look yonder, at that other venerable figure——"
"The gentleman who is twiddling his stick across his arm, as though he were practising the bars of a fandango? Who may he be?"
"Arndt, the great composer. Have you men like him in your British parliament?"
"Why, I must confess we have not yet thought of ransacking the orchestra for statesmen. Any more?"
"Yes. You see that tall grizzled man over the way. That is Anastasius Grün."
"Graf von Auersperg? Well, he is a gentleman at least; though, as to poetical pretension, I have always considered him very much on a par with Dicky Milnes. But where are your statesmen, professor? Where are the men who have made politics the study of their lives, who have mastered the theories of government and the science of economics, and who have all the different treaties of Europe at the ends of their fingers?"