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DOMESTIC MANNERS OF TUE PRUS3IANS.

dorn which distinguished the Anglo-Saxon people; so thatBritish veins may be said to contain the essence, as it were, ofall the noblest tribes the world ever saw—a commingling ofnatures, which, if the maxim be true that the continualinterbreeding among the same stock tends to the degenerationof the species, would assuredly serve to give extra yigourand spirit to the original nature of the race.

But, putting this purely physical view on one side, andassuming the Germans to have come from the same stockas ourselves, there is a still more cogent reason why the"■Deutschers'' should be less worldly-wise than "Engländers."

If every man were left to himself to obtain a knowledge ofthe world, and the people round about him, assuredly eventhe Newtons and Shakspeares, and the Göthes and Leib-nitzes, would be little better than savages — so small is thenumber of facts that a man can know of his own cognizance,and so limited the experience even of the longest and mostadventurous lives. When we look back upon the severaltruth-funds that make up the various sciences, and see howmany minds it has taken to raise the philosophic structureof each, and what a mere mite of knowledge even the greatestintellects have added to the entire mass, verily the tribe ofindividual philosophers dwindles almost into the insignificanceof the coralliferi; whilst in their aggregate capacity theybecome magnified into the patient and persevering builders-upof new territories. Even in those arts, too, — suchas drawingand painting—in which extraordinary skill is regarded as anatural gift, how it startles us to find that it took near upona thousand years for the ancient artists to pass from a know-ledge of mere outline to that of light and shade!

So comparatively impotent, indeed, are the Operations ofisolated genius, that it is impossible for any one man to bephilosophically great by his own unaided exertions; and it