GERMANY AND ENGLAND IN 1854.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SFECTATOR."]
SIR,—It is interesting, and even amusing, to notice the difference of the tone of the German Press at the time of the Crimean War from that of the present day, when we are again fighting against darkness and tyranny. Thus the lalnische Zeititng, after describing the battle of Inkerman, and expressing a hope that the Germans. will not lag behind the English "when it is a question of defending the common civilisation'of Europe against the onslaught of Asia " Russia), concludes as follows:—" The blood which once smoked down' to the sea from Thermopylae was not more nobly shed than that of the British death-defying heroes which flowed through the defiles of Inkerman. That dear and precious blood (jenes thaterwerthe Blut) makes us Germans blush." Equally striking are the different views of learned German Professors of that day and this,—between, e.g., the illustrious philologian Grimm and the great historian Mommsen. Not long ago the latter, though we have always received him with the honour due to his vast learning, and assisted him in every way in his researches, prophesied, with apparent satisfaction, that Russia, France, and Germany would one day unite to spoil Great Britain of her dominions. The great Grimm, on the other hand, in a lecture, "On the Origin of Language," delivered before the Royal Academy in Berlin in 1851, says : —" No modern language has derived so great a degree of strength and power from its disregard of all laws of sound, and the dropping of nearly all inflexions, as the English. This language depends upon its fulness of free medial tones—which may be learned, indeed, but which no rules can teach—for a power of expression such as never perhaps was possessed by any human tongue. Its altogether intellectual and singularly happy development arose from a surprising alliance of the two noblest languages of Europe,—the German
and the Romanesque Yes, truly the English language, by which, not in vain, the greatest poet of modern times (Shakespeare) has been produced and nurtured,—the English language, I say, may with good reason call itself a
universal language, and seems chosen, like the English people to rule in a still greater degree in all the corners of the earth. For in richness, in pare reason and flexibility, no modern language can compare with it, not even the German."
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