When several hundred or thousand young men are thus thrown together, with their time all their own, and none to whom they are responsible for their actions, it may easily be supposed that many abuses and irregularities will occur.  Yet the great mass are better than they have been represented; though regular attendance upon lectures is true only of those who ox it at home, as the phrase goes, and who by the rioting, beer-drinking Burschen are styled Philistines or Camels.  These same quiet individuals, whom the Samsons affect to despise, will be found to be by far in preponderance, when the statistics of Corps, Landmannschaften, and all such clubs, are looked into; though the characteristic of the latter, always to be seen at public places of amusement with their colored caps, gaudy watch-guards, or cannon-boots, would lead one to suppose that German student-life was one round of beer-drinking, sword-slashing, and jolly existence, as represented, or rather, misrepresented, by William Howitt, in the halo of poetry he throws around it.  No,—­the fantastically dressed fellows whom the tourist may notice at Jena, and the groups of starers who stop every narrow passageway in front of the confectionery-shops of Heidelberg, or amuse themselves of summer-afternoons with their trained dogs, diverting the attention of the temporary guest of “Prince Carl” from the contemplation of the old ruined castle of the Counts-Palatine,—­these are but a fraction of the German students.  From, among them may be chosen those tight-laced officers who make the court-residences of Europe look like camps; or, as they are often the sons of noblemen or rich parents, they may reach some of the sinecures in the State.  They make their student-years but a pretext for a life of rough debauchery, from which they issue with a bought diploma; and, in many cases, satiated and disgusted with their own lives, they dwindle down into the timeserving reactionaries, the worst enemies of free development, because they themselves have abused in youth the little liberty they enjoyed.

If the numbers be counted of those who lead the life so much extolled by William Howitt,—­who, by the way, has left out some of its roughest traits,—­they will be found, even where most numerous, as in the smaller towns, never to exceed one-fourth of those inscribed as students.  The linguists and philosophers of Germany, her historians and men of letters, her professors and savans, have come from the ranks of that stiller and more numerous class whom the stranger will never notice:  for their triennium is spent mostly in the lecture-room or at home; and their conviviality—­for there are neither disciples nor apostles of temperance in this beer-drinking land—­is of a nature not to divert them from their earnest pursuits.