to, even when he barks at a real thief.  Therefore the distinguished thieves who plunder England do not think it necessary to throw the growling Cobbett a bone to stop his mouth.  This makes the dog furiously savage, and he shows all his hungry teeth.  Poor old Cobbett!  England’s dog!  I have no love for thee, for every vulgar nature my soul abhors:  but thou touchest me to the inmost soul with pity, as I see how thou strainest in vain to break loose and to get at those thieves, who make off with their booty before thy very eyes, and mock at thy fruitless springs and thine impotent howling."[145]

There is balm in Philistia as well as in Gilead.  A chosen circle of children of the modern spirit, perfectly emancipated from prejudice and commonplace, regarding the ideal side of things in all its efforts for change, passionately despising half-measures and condescension to human folly and obstinacy,—­with a bewildered, timid, torpid multitude behind,—­conducts a country to the government of Herr von Bismarck.  A nation regarding the practical side of things in its efforts for change, attacking not what is irrational, but what is pressingly inconvenient, and attacking this as one body, “moving altogether if it move at all,” [146] and treating children of light like the very harshest of step-mothers, comes to the prosperity and liberty of modern England.  For all that, however, Philistia (let me say it again) is not the true promised land, as we English commonly imagine it to be; and our excessive neglect of the idea, and consequent inaptitude for it, threatens us, at a moment when the idea is beginning to exercise a real power in human society, with serious future inconvenience, and, in the meanwhile, cuts us off from the sympathy of other nations, which feel its power more than we do.

But, in 1830, Heine very soon found that the fire-engines of the German governments were too much for his direct efforts at incendiarism.  “What demon drove me,” he cries, “to write my Reisebilder, to edit a newspaper, to plague myself with our time and its interests, to try and shake the poor German Hodge out of his thousand years’ sleep in his hole?  What good did I get by it?  Hodge opened his eyes, only to shut them again immediately; he yawned, only to begin snoring again the next minute louder than ever; he stretched his stiff ungainly limbs, only to sink down again directly afterwards, and lie like a dead man in the old bed of his accustomed habits.  I must have rest; but where am I to find a resting-place?  In Germany I can no longer stay.”

This is Heine’s jesting account of his own efforts to rouse Germany:  now for his pathetic account of them; it is because he unites so much wit with so much pathos that he is so effective a writer:—­