as the only emblems worthy of their profession, the level, the square, and the compass.  All the lodges, wherever established, considered that of Strasbourg as the common parent; and at a meeting held at Ratisbon in 1459, it was agreed that the ARCHITECT OF STRASBOURG CATHEDRAL should be the Grand Master of Free-masons; and one DOTZINGER of Worms, who had succeeded Hulz in 1449, (just after the latter, had finished the spire) was acknowledged to be the FIRST GRAND MASTER.  I own my utter ignorance in the lore of free-masonry; but have thought it worth while to send you these particulars:  as I know you to be very “curious and prying” in antiquarian researches connected with this subject.

Strasbourg has been always eminent for its literary reputation, from the time of the two STURMII, or rather from that of GEYLER, downwards.  It boasts of historians, chroniclers, poets, critics, and philologists.  At this present moment the public school, or university, is allowed to be in a most flourishing condition; and the name of SCHWEIGHAEUSER alone is sufficient to rest its pretensions to celebrity on the score of classical acumen and learning.  While, within these last hundred years, the names of SCHOEPFLIN, OBERLIN, and KOCH, form a host in the department of topography and political economy.

In Annals and Chronicles, perhaps no provincial city in Europe is richer; while in old Alsatian poetry there is an almost inexhaustible banquet to feast upon.  M. Engelhardt, the brother in law of M. Schweighaeuser junr. is just now busily engaged in giving an account of some of the ancient love poets, or Minne-Singers; and he shewed me the other day some curious drawings relating to the same, taken from a MS. of the XIIIth century, in the public library.  But Oberlin, in 1786, published an interesting work “De Poetis Alsatiae eroticis medii aevi”—­and more lately in 1806; M. Arnold in his “Notice litteraire et historique sur les poetes alsaciens,” 1806, 8vo.—­enriched by the previous remarks of Schoepflin, Oberlin, and Frantz—­has given a very satisfactory account of the achievements of the Muses who seem to have inhabited the mountain-tops of Alsatia—­from the ninth to the sixteenth century inclusively.  It is a fertile and an interesting subject.  Feign would I, if space and time allowed, give you an outline of the same; from the religious metres of Ottfried in the ninth—­to the charming and tender touches which are to be found in the Hortus deliciarum[227] of Herade Abbess of Landsberg, in the twelfth-century:  not meaning to pass over, in my progress, the effusions of philology and poetry which distinguished the rival abbey of Hohenbourg in the same century.  Indeed; not fewer than three Abbesses—­ Relinde, Herade, and Edelinde_—­cultivated literature at one and the same time:  when, in Arnold’s opinion, almost the whole of Europe was plunged in barbarism and ignorance.  Then