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DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE PRUSSIANS.

The length of the vertical lino separating "Your Highand Princely Serenity" from "Your most submissive ser-vant," marks the extent of the assumed inferiority of thewriter to the person he is addressing; and such people aswould debase themselves to an unusual degree extend theline to an inordinate length, taking care to prolong their letterso that the conclusion, as here printed, may fall upon a freshpage, and thus leave them an entire side of appropriate fools-cap to indicate how much lower they consider themselvesthan the noble to whom they are writing.

Now, it is easy to make allowance for the wretched vanityof the Emperor of China, when, to mark his fancied superiorityto his earthly subjects, he translates himself titulary to theHeavens ; and in proof of his celestial nature declares that heis "brother of the sun" and "grandfather of the moon." Butif a sense of human frailty teach us merely to smile at suchfanatical conceit on the part of his lunatic majesty (for self-love lifts us all, more or less, to the seventh heaven of our ownadmiration), we can but feel an indignant contempt for thosepoor abject toadies who, without the excuse of self-esteem,are mean enough to apply such monstrous terms of adulationto a bcing like themselves.

We are taught, however, to regard the Chinese as a bar-barous nation; whereas the Germans are ambitious of beingranked as a thinking race, and pretend to look beneath thesurface into the " essences" of things, setting themselves up asthe " Critics of Pure Reason," and reducing the understandingsand consciences of all men to an abstract psychological " one-ness." And yet in this same nation, which assumes to becivilised, and aspires to be rational and conscientious, we findthe great body of the people — professors and philosophers in-cluded—so deficient of all sense of real human dignity—soutterly wanting in independence of spirit on the one band, and