ever grew weary.  There is a great deal more poetry in Brixton than in Berlin.  Stella said that Swift could write charmingly about a broom-stick; and poor Carlyle had to write romantically about a ramrod.  Compare him with Heine, who had also a detached taste in the mystical grotesques of Germany, but who saw what was their enemy:  and offered to nail up the Prussian eagle like an old crow as a target for the archers of the Rhine.  Its prosaic essence is not proved by the fact that it did not produce poets:  it is proved by the more deadly fact that it did.  The actual written poetry of Frederick the Great, for instance, was not even German or barbaric, but simply feeble—­and French.  Thus Carlyle became continually gloomier as his fit of the blues deepened into Prussian blues; nor can there be any wonder.  His philosophy had brought out the result that the Prussian was the first of Germans, and, therefore, the first of men.  No wonder he looked at the rest of us with little hope.

But a stronger test was coming both for Carlyle and England.  Prussia, plodding, policing, as materialist as mud, went on solidifying and strengthening after unconquered Russia and unconquered England had rescued her where she lay prostrate under Napoleon.  In this interval the two most important events were the Polish national revival, with which Russia was half inclined to be sympathetic, but Prussia was implacably coercionist; and the positive refusal of the crown of a united Germany by the King of Prussia, simply because it was constitutionally offered by a free German Convention.  Prussia did not want to lead the Germans:  she wanted to conquer the Germans.  And she wanted to conquer other people first.  She had already found her brutal, if humorous, embodiment in Bismarck; and he began with a scheme full of brutality and not without humour.  He took up, or rather pretended to take up, the claim of the Prince of Augustenberg to duchies which were a quite lawful part of the land of Denmark.  In support of this small pretender he enlisted two large things, the Germanic body called the Bund and the Austrian Empire.  It is possibly needless to say that after he had seized the disputed provinces by pure Prussian violence, he kicked out the Prince of Augustenberg, kicked out the German Bund, and finally kicked out the Austrian Empire too, in the sudden campaign of Sadowa.  He was a good husband and a good father; he did not paint in water colours; and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.  But the symbolic intensity of the incident was this.  The Danes expected protection from England; and if there had been any sincerity in the ideal side of our Teutonism they ought to have had it.  They ought to have had it even by the pedantries of the time, which already talked of Latin inferiority:  and were never weary of explaining that the country of Richelieu could not rule and the country of Napoleon could not fight.  But if it was necessary for whosoever would be saved to be a Teuton, the Danes