Saunterings eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 306 pages of information about Saunterings.

Saunterings eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 306 pages of information about Saunterings.
troops quartered in the city now.  The young officers are everywhere, lounging in the cafes, smoking and sipping coffee, on all the public promenades, in the gardens, the theaters, the churches.  And most of them are fine-looking fellows, good figures in elegantly fitting and tasteful uniforms; but they do like to show their handsome forms and hear their sword-scabbards rattle on the pavement as they stride by.  The beer-gardens are full of the common soldiers, who empty no end of quart mugs in alternate pulls from the same earthen jug, with the utmost jollity and good fellowship.  On the street, salutes between officers and men are perpetual, punctiliously given and returned,—­the hand raised to the temple, and held there for a second.  A young gallant, lounging down the Theatiner or the Maximilian Strasse, in his shining and snug uniform, white kids, and polished boots, with jangling spurs and the long sword clanking on the walk, raising his hand ever and anon in condescending salute to a lower in rank, or with affable grace to an equal, is a sight worth beholding, and for which one cannot be too grateful.  We have not all been created with the natural shape for soldiers, but we have eyes given us that we may behold them.

Bavaria fought, you know, on the wrong side at Sadowa; but the result of the war left her in confederation with Prussia.  The company is getting to be very distasteful, for Austria is at present more liberal than Prussia.  Under Prussia one must either be a soldier or a slave, the democrats of Munich say.  Bavaria has the most liberal constitution in Germany, except that of Wurtemberg, and the people are jealous of any curtailment of liberty.  It seems odd that anybody should look to the house of Hapsburg for liberality.  The attitude of Prussia compels all the little states to keep up armies, which eat up their substance, and burden the people with taxes.  This is the more to be regretted now, when Bavaria is undergoing a peaceful revolution, and throwing off the trammels of galling customs in other respects.

THE EMANCIPATION OF MUNICH

The 1st of September saw go into complete effect the laws enacted in 1867, which have inaugurated the greatest changes in business and social life, and mark an era in the progress of the people worthy of fetes and commemorative bronzes.  We heard the other night at the opera-house “William Tell” unmutilated.  For many years this liberty-breathing opera was not permitted to be given in Bavaria, except with all the life of it cut out.  It was first presented entire by order of young King Ludwig, who, they say, was induced to command its unmutilated reproduction at the solicitation of Richard Wagner, who used to be, and very likely is now, a “Red,” and was banished from Saxony in 1848 for fighting on the people’s side of a barricade in Dresden.  It is the fashion to say of the young king, that he pays no heed to the business of the kingdom. 

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Saunterings from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.