It has been more than once asserted that Ferdinand II. was a sworn member of the order, and that he contributed largely to its funds. Certain it is the Camorra in his reign performed all the functions of a secret police, and was the terror of all whose Liberalism made them suspected by the Government. To the Camorra, too, were always intrusted those displays of popular enthusiasm by which the King was wont to reply to the angry remonstrances of French or English envoys. The Camorra could at a moment's notice organise a demonstration in honour of royalty which would make the monarch appear as the loved and cherished father of his people.

It was, however, by the Liberals themselves the Camorra was first introduced into political life, and Liberio Romano intrusted the defence of the capital to these men as the surest safeguard against the depredations of the disbanded soldiers of the King; and, strange to say, the hazardous experiment was a perfect success, and for several weeks Naples had no other protectors than the members of a league who combined the atrocities of Thuggee with the shameless rapine of the highwayman. The stern discipline of Piedmont would not, however, condescend to deal with such agents; and Lamarmora has waged a war, open and avowed, against the whole system of the Camorra. Hundreds of arrests have been made, and the jails are crowded with Camorrists; but men declare that all these measures are in vain-that the magistracy itself is not free from the taint and certain it is that the system prevails largely in the army and navy, and has its followers in what is called the world of fashion and society.

The Mezzo Galantuomo is the most terrible ingredient in the constitution of a people. The man who is too bad for society but a little too good for the gallows, is

a large element in this land, and it will require something more than mere statecraft to deal with him.

A Parliamentary Commission is at present engaged in the investigation of the whole question of Brigandage, and their "Report" will probably be before the world in a few days. It is very doubtful, however, if that world will be made much the wiser by their labours. There is, in fact, no mystery as to the nature of this pestilence, its source, or its progress.

It may suit the views of a party to endeavour to connect it with Bourbonism, but it would be equally true to assert that the peasant-murderers in Ireland were adherents of the Stuarts! The men who take to the mountains in the Capitanata are not politicians. They have no other "cause" at heart than their own subsistence, for which they would rather provide at the risk of their heads than by the labour of their hands. All that they know of civilisation is taxation and the conscription. In these respects the old régime was less severe than the present; neither the imposts were so heavy, nor the levies so large; not to add that, under the Bourbons, soldiers led lives of lounging indolence, and "no one was ever cruel enough to lead them against the Austrians."

The Bourbon Government of Naples had many faults, but the Piedmontese rule has had no successes. There is that of ungeniality in the Northern temperament that renders even favours at their hands little better than burdens, and their justice has a smack of severity in it that wonderfully resembles revenge.

What may be the future fate of Southern Italy it is not easy to say; but one thing at least is certain, the influence of Piedmont has not obtained that footing there which promises to make her cause their cause, or her civilisation their civilisation. If the Bourbons governed badly, their successors do not govern at all!

INCONTESTABLY, since the death of Goethe, Ludwig Uhland has been, at least in the hearts of the people, the Laureate of Germany. He is not a poet who took the world by storm with his earliest productions; but he has been gradually growing in favour and general acceptance, until his death is now deplored as a national affliction. He died quietly at Tübingen, the place of his birth, on the 13th of November 1862, in his seventy-sixth year, having been born on the 26th of April 1787. He was said never to have known a day's illness until his last, which was occasioned by his attending the funeral of a friend and brother poet, Justin Kerner, in inclement weather.

The parents of the poet were Johann Friedrich Uhland, Secretary to the University of Tübingen, and Elizabeth (born) Hoser, daughter of one Hoser who held a similar office. He had a brother, Fritz, who died in his ninth year, and a sister, Luise, who married Meyer, the pastor of Pfullingen, near Reutlingen. His education conduced to bringing out the talent that was latent in him, as it was the custom of Kauffmann, the rector of the Tübingen school, to give free themes to be worked out in prose or verse, according to the inclinations of his scholars; and the young Uhland generally chose the latter, and was early distinguished in his choice. Even at school he was known as an enthusiastic student of German and Scandinavian antiquities. At the age of sixteen and seventeen he produced many compositions of merit, but only two, Der Sterbender Held,' and 'Der Blinder König,' found their way into that collection of his poems which was published in 1815. At this time he was hesitating between the professions of law and medicine. As a youth, though given to long walks alone in the beautiful neighbourhood of Tübin

gen, he was distinguished by his love of social manly exercises, particularly of skating. Two of his earliest poetical friends were Schröder, who was afterwards drowned in the Baltic, and Harpprecht, who fell in the Russian campaign of Napoleon. This is the friend who is alluded to in the exquisite poem of 'Die Ueberfahrt' as "brausend vor uns allen," while the fatherly friend spoken of there is Uhland's maternal uncle, Hoser, the pastor of Schmiden. He was also much influenced in his tastes by Haug of Stuttgard, and Gortz, Professor of Ancient Literature in Tübingen. Later he became acquainted with Justin Kerner, whose talent he placed above his own, Oehlenschläger the Danish poet, and Varnhagen von Ense the historian. Goethe he had seen once when a boy in 1797, and he records his impressions in the Münstersage.' In 1810 Uhland went to Paris, in order to work at the treasures of Romance literature contained in the Imperial Library. On his return he applied himself to practice as an advocate at Stuttgard, without remitting his poetic labours. His tragedy, 'Herzog Ernst von Schwaben,' which belongs to this period, elicited the warm admiration of Goethe. In 1819 he was elected a deputy of the Würtemberg States. In 1820 he married Emma Vischer, a daughter, by a former marriage, of a celebrated woman, Frau Emilie Pistorius, to whose memory Rückert dedicated a poem called 'Rosen auf das Grab einer edlen Frau.' In 1834 he was made Professor of German Literature at Tübingen. He distinguished himself as a political character in 1848, though without joining the extreme Liberal party, and on one occasion presented an address to the King of Würtemberg, praying for the restoration of the Constitution, the prayer of which was immediately granted, as

most prayers of the kind were at that particular time, from prudential motives. He had already resigned, in 1833, his office of deputy, finding it incompatible with his professorship, and had returned to his residence at Tübingen. His marriage with Emma Vischer was in many respects a fortunate one. He appears to have lived with her in great harmony till his death, and the dowry she brought him, though not large, was sufficient to keep from his door the anxieties which usually beset a priest of the Muses. On the other hand, the marriage was not blest by children. There are old pictures extant of Uhland as a child, with a fair honest face and powdered hair. His later face is now familiar to the Germans. Its first impression is decidedly heavy. The upper-lip is long, the cheekbones high, the eyes not large, the forehead broad over the brows, and narrower above-altogether an ordinary honest man's face, nothing more. A phrenologist in a steamboat, to whom the poet was unknown, once guessed him to be a watchmaker, adding, to console him, that every one could not be a poet. Uhland's manners appear to have been plain and unpretending -rather those of a man who makes friends than acquaintances. Yet those who knew him, knew him as a hearty and even jovial companion. He was shy, and shunned publicity, and could not bear to be treated as a literary lion. On one occasion, when he was presented with a crown of laurel, he hung it and left it on an oak beside the road. His habits were early and healthy. In summer he lived in his open garden-house, and at ten o'clock every morning used to go out for a long walk, prefaced by a plunge in the Neckar when the weather was genial. At Tübingen, which is a very pretty quaint little university town, lying in that finely-broken country which intervenes between the Black Forest and the Alps, he owned a plain house on the country side of the Neckar bridge, only

ornamented by Corinthian pilasters in front; behind it was his garden, arranged in terraces, and his "Weinberg," from which he made his own ordinary supply of wine. He was of social habits, but, at the same time, fond of musing and solitude. The homely but intellectual society of Tübingen fully sufficed him. He was not a man to care for that of those above him in station, as his sterling independence shrank from patronage in the same way in which his diffidence shrank from general notoriety.

Politically, Uhland was a people's man without being a Radical. His love of medieval literature imbued his mind with respect for hereditary rank, station, and honours, while his love of freedom and optimist views of the future of his country and mankind in general, made him a sturdy opponent of any attempt to infringe on what he called "the good old right." In England he might have been a Tory or Conservative Whig. In Germany, it has pleased the powers that be to count him with the Democratic party; hence the admiration or policy which prompted Louis Napoleon to make a national affair of the funeral of Béranger, was wanting in the case of Uhland, who was buried, as he had lived, in privacy. Although this does not tell well for the temper of the Government of Würtemberg, and fully accounts for the hatred of Englishmen which is said to be dominant at Stuttgard, the deceased poet would probably not have wished it otherwise. No doubt he was, as far as the honours that proceed from the great are concerned, to the end of his life an unacknowledged and unappreciated man. But he had all he wanted-robust health, self-respect, and the respect of those he loved, sufficient worldly means, and that divine gift which Homer himself thought a full compensation even for blindness.

The uneventfulness of Uhland's life, his unpretending presence, his very look and bearing, his intense love for nature, the simplicity of

his habits, his steady domestic character, and unaffected religious feeling, all bring to mind our own Wordsworth; and in his poems, as in those of Wordsworth, the gems are to be sought among the shorter compositions. But Wordsworth made it his business to sit down at the Lakes and paint nature in words, as the pre-Raphaelite or naturalistic school of landscape painters sit down and paint her in colours. Wordsworth wooed the beauty of nature immediately and for itself. His human figures are merely put in roughly to help out the foreground. But Uhland rarely paints nature directly; he rather uses natural scenery as a background to his "genre" pictures, which interest chiefly by presenting the phases of human feeling, and the joys and sorrows of mankind. All his poems are alive with the breath of Spring fresh, luminous, and joyous; but we are aware of his surroundings rather from the effects they produce upon him than from any actual descriptions. His poems have the ring of the true singer; an internal melody permeates his verse, capricious rather than monotonous, changing its airs and cadences like the voice of a bird, rather than flowing on with the mechanical jingling of a musical box. This is the quality which gives the bardic stamp to the compositions of a Burns, a Beranger, a Tennyson, and a want of which is felt in the glowing rhetoric of Byron, and in

"The beauty for ever unchangingly bright, Like the soft sunny lapse of a summer day's light,"

which belongs to the poetry of Moore. In matter and choice of subject, and in some measure in respect of treatment, he has much in common with Walter Scott. His preparatory studies were much of the same nature, consisting in the history, scenery, and legends of his own country. He has done for Germany what even Schiller and Goethe with all their greatness omitted to do in the same degree. He has

immortalised her local recollections. Second only to the man who leads an army to rescue his country from the stranger, such a man is a patriot of the true kind, whatever the colour of his politics may be. Some poems he has written are like those exquisite ancient miniature pictures on a gold ground, best to be understood and appreciated by the educated connoisseur, while others are so plain in language and sentiment that they have sunk into the hearts of the people, and will flow for ever from the lips of the people in the shape of national songs. Uhland differs most from the twin stars of GermanySchiller and Goethe-in that his poetry is more exclusively objective than theirs. Goethe was all wrapt in his glorious self, and his all-absorbing devotion to art. Like Horace's hero, a world might have fallen in ruins about him and he would not have quailed; and, indeed, all the crash of empires and clash of armies in which he lived left his brow as serene as that of one of the gods of Epicurus. But Uhland could not sing through the humiliation of his country, and his voice sank within him through the French occupation; but when Germany arose at length, and with incredible hardihood pushed back the flood of invasion, Uhland, like Körner and others, did manful service, not by fighting and falling among the foremost, as Körner did, but with even better judgment, as husbanding his gifts, becoming the Tyrtæus of the Liberation War. His songs of that time have a deep and manly note peculiarly their own, and they are such as no lesser circumstances could have called forth. Uhland, again, as distinguished from Schiller and Goethe, was the prominent poet of the Romantic school. But he was to them what Socrates was to the Sophists-counted with them, but not of them. From whatever source he derived his inspirations, he always remained fast rooted in truth and nature. The unreal and morbid sentimentality of Tieck and

Novalis was unknown to him; nor did he share the Romeward tendencies of Friedrich Schlegel, while fully appreciating the beauty of the Roman Catholic ritual and associations, and freely interweaving them with the golden tissue of his compositions. On the whole, he is the most German of German poets, as he owes none of his inspiration to "the gods of Greece," and little to any foreign source, except those old Romance writers whom he studied at Paris; but then it must be borne in mind that the early threads of history in France and Germany are closely interwoven, and the empire of the Franks in particular belonged as much to one as to the other.

In attempting to present to the English reader some of the best of the poems of Uhland, we must premise that to translate a perfect poem from one language into another is simply an impossibility, and difficult exactly in proportion to the degree in which any poem approaches perfection. The special difficulty of translating German

a song in the whole collection more perfect than 'Der Wirthin Töchterlein.' There is not a word or thought one would wish changed. The pathos is expressed, without a single pathetic epithet, solely by the situation. This poem has been interpreted politically, as alluding to the different feelings with which three classes of patriots regard the corpse of German liberty. But to our mind this spoils the simplicity of the picture. It is more likely to be true that the poem was occasioned by an incident of Uhland's youth, since it is said that he once stopped some students who were singing it under his window, telling them not to end it, as the end had too close a personal interest for him. If this be true, the poem is more complimentary to the memory of the fair maid of the inn than to the lady who became Frau Uhland. But poets will be poets, as boys will be boys.

THE LANDLADY'S DAUGHTER. Three students they hied them over the Rhine,

consists in this, that though the two languages are not in their basis much more than dialects of the same original stock, yet German is as generally dissyllabic as English is monosyllabic, owing in part to English having discarded inflection where German retains it. We are aware that many of Uhland's poems are already known through very good translations, one of those most highly spoken of being that of Mr Platt. Longfellow has also done freely into English verse the 'Castle by the Sea,' 'The Black Knight,' the 'Luck of Edenhall,' and others, and has succeeded admirably in catching the spirit of the original. Not having Mr Platt's translations before us, as we write in Germany, we must apologise, in our zeal for Uhland's memory, for attempts of our own in the same direction, in which we have tried to reproduce as nearly as we can the ideas of the original in the metres in which they appeared. It is impossible to find

VOL. XCIII.-NO. DLXXI.

sign.

"Landlady, hast thou good beer and wine? And where is that beauteous daughter of thine?"

"My beer and wine are fresh and clear; My daughter she lies on the funeral-bier." And when they did enter the inner room, There lay she all white in a shrine of gloom.

The first from her face the veil he took, And, gazing upon her with sorrowful look,

"Oh, wert thou living, thou fairest maid, "Tis thee I would love from this hour," he said.

The second let down on the face that slept The veil, and turned him away and wept :

"Alas for thee there on the funeral-bier! For thee I have loved full many a year."

The third, he lifted again the veil,
And kissed her upon the mouth so pale:

"I loved thee before, I love thee to-day, And I will love thee for ever and aye!"

The last line, "Und werde dich

2 R