Thanks, not to her statesmen, not to her nobility, not to her princes even, that Germany has at last fairly shaken off the self-imposed yoke of servile French imitation, but thanks to her scholars who centre in her twenty-six universities!  There was a time, and that not a century ago, when the German language was considered to be of too limited circulation for works of general scientific interest.  Lectures were all delivered in Latin, until Thomasius broke open a new path, and now lessons otherwise than in the vernacular tongue are exceptions.  French was long the universal medium.  Even Humboldt wrote most of his works in that language; and it is not two years since one of the most distinguished Egyptian scholars of Prussia published his History of Egypt in French.  The last representatives of this tendency are dying off.  The days are over, when every petty German prince must create in his domains a servile imitation of the stiff parks of Versailles,—­the days of powdered wigs and long cues,—­when French ballet-dancers gave the tone, and French actors strutted on every stage,—­when Boileau was the great canon of criticism, and Racine and Moliere perpetuated in tragedy and comedy a pseudo-classicism.  They are far, those times when Frederick the Great wrote French at which Voltaire laughed, and could find no better occupation for his leisure hours at Sans-Souci than the discussion of the materialistic philosophy of the Encyclopedists, while he affected to despise his own tongue, rejecting every effort towards the popularization of a national literature.  Well is it for Germany that other ideas now prevail,—­well, that Goethe in his old age overcame the Gallomania, which for a while possessed him, of translating all his works, and thenceforth writing only in French.  The iron hand of Goetz of Berlichingen would burst the seams of a Paris kid-glove.  The bold lyric and dramatic poesy of a language whose figures well up in each word with primitive freshness can ill be contained in an idiom blase by conventionality and frozen into crystal rigidity by the academy of the illustrious forty,—­in an idiom in which an unfortunate pun or allusion can destroy the effect of a whole piece.  We need but call to mind that Shakspeare’s “Othello” was laughed off the stage of the Odeon, owing to the ridiculous ideas the word “napkin” or “handkerchief” called up in the auditory.

Nor is the influence of the university in Germany exerted in matters of great national interest only.  It pervades the social, literary, and political organization of the people.  The least part of what characterizes an individual nation ever comes into its books.  Here it finds its way from mouth to mouth to the remotest corners of the land.  When Luther, the Professor of Wittenberg, spoke against indulgences, it was more than priest or monk that was heard.  The voice of the monk would not have echoed beyond his cell, and the influence of the priest would have been arrested and checked before it could have been exerted beyond the limits of his parish or town.  But the Professor Luther addressed himself to a more influential audience.  His words were carried before many years into every part of the Empire.