THE TITTLE TATTLE OF A PHILOSOPHER.
Meine Lebensreise. In Sechs Stazionen; von Urceus.
My Journey through Life, In Six Stages; by Urceus,
(i.e. by Krug; urceus—as we may inform our fair readers,
being the Latin for krug, which in German means a pitcher or jug.)
Professor Krug of Leipsic is a person of no small consideration in Germany. It is true that the philosophers of the high transcendental school look upon him as the very dirt beneath their feet. They speak of him as belonging to that class of authors of whom it is said—Ils se sont battus les flancs pour être de grands hommes; but let him batter his sides, say they, till they ache again, he is unable to give utterance to a single note of genuine philosophic inspiration. Mystical dreamers, retorts the professor, are ye, one and all of you, you transcendentalists. Your world is but a phantom, and is peopled with phantoms. Your theories are utterly repudiated by common sense, and, unlike the rest of mankind, you make it your pride to be seen walking on your heads. It may be so, answer the transcendentalists, but you have no head to walk upon, worthy Professor Urceus.
Still, notwithstanding these asperities, and although our professor is altogether disowned by the genuine children of speculation, it must be admitted that the man who was deemed worthy to be the immediate successor of Kant, in the Chair of Philosophy, at Königsberg, and who presided with courage and ability over the University of Leipsic during the memorable crisis of 1813, when that city, like a convulsed human heart, was the bloody nucleus around which was raging the battle of a nation's life—it must be admitted that such a man has some claims on the consideration of those who are interested either in literary or military history. The industry of Professor Krug has been indefatigable, and the versatility of his talents is prodigious. For the last forty years, scarcely an event has occurred, scarcely an opinion has been broached in Germany, without his having come forward and taken part in the discussion. No subject comes amiss to his band, from the philosophy of ancient down to the liberation of modern Greece. We are not, however, going to follow him through his multifarious undertakings. We shall merely attempt to lay before our reader an undress picture of the man as he himself has painted it in his autobiography, using our own discretion in curtailing the light-hearted, though somewhat exuberant loquacity of the original. His work. is divided into six stages.
Stage the first. My childhood—1770, 1782. I was born, say the professor, at Radis, a small village near Wittenberg, at the midnight hour, between the 21st and the 22d of June 1770. There was not at that time, in all Germany, a more secluded spot than the hamlet in which I first saw the light. But the loveliness of nature is doomed to be every where violated by the march of modern improvement, and the house in which I was born, and the garden in which I played in my infancy, were long ago swept away in order to make room for the great high way which now stretches its weary length between Leipsic and Berlin.
The period at which my birth happened, gave rise to much controversy in our small community. My father insisted that the midnight hour belonged to the 22d of the month; and accordingly maintained that I was born on that day. On the other hand, the parson reckoned it to belong to the preceding day, and entered me in the parish register as born on the 21st. Leaving the world to side with either of these worthies as it pleases on this important point, I may remark that, in my progress through life, I have extracted from this uncertainty an advantage not enjoyed by those who have only one birthday to come and go upon. In early life, when one is proud of being thought old, I always declared myself in favour of the 21st; but now that I am getting into the sear and yellow leaf, my predilection for senility is considerably abated, and I am decidedly of opinion that the 22d was the day of my birth.
I have been informed, that at the time of my birth a still more animated
