that he may err and be ready to learn from others, Fichte told him that he spoke like a man who had never been convinced in his life.
The last twenty years have made the Germans careful in the economy of force, and they waste less powder in salutes. Their soldiers were on the Loire when they began to say that their scholars were to be no more the humble servants of the foreigner. Nothing, said Mommsen, is so hollow as the pretence of humility. "We are not modest by any means, and do not wish it to be thought of us." The National-Zeitung confessed that its countrymen, though not envious, are slow to acknowledge merit, and added that hundreds of Germans remain unknown, who in France would lead science and society. Würtz's exaltation of Lavoisier, and Schérer's highly discriminating estimate of Goethe, were received with indignation; and Rümelin's able but unceremonious book is one among many signs of rising impatience at the old enthusiasm for Shakespeare.
As early as 1849, Prince Albert said to Bunsen that self-sufficiency was the German rock ahead. The historians generally escaped this peril and welcomed every proof of superiority. During many years Pauli regularly introduced the Rolls publications which were undermining the work of his life, and admitted that there were points on which the History of the Norman Conquest surpasses everything yet written on the Middle Ages. Ewald preferred Selden to all his followers in Syriac. Lehrs declared that he could make nothing of the political life of Greece until he read Grote. The Prolegomena to Tischendorf's last text have, I believe, been committed to an English hand; and Bailleu says that the best lives of the greatest modern Germans, of Frederic, Stein, and Goethe, are those which have been written in England. Rosenkranz thought Damiron superior to the German historians of philosophy; Böhmer rated Delisle's Philippe Auguste above every German book of the same kind; and Böckh, irritated just then by the absurdities of Gerlach and the temerities of Mommsen, said that Wallon's
