there are Havermanns and his kind to bind the sheaves together. A country that has so much force of character, morality, and shrewdness, lying, as it were, fallow in every farm and village, cannot be wondered at that it flings into fame in each generation its full measure of great men, and that, when its enemies commence to swarm, it finds a hero in every flaxen poll summoned from the plow or the stable.

As long as the Plattdeutsch oak flourishes, and the Plattdeutsch speech is uttered, so long will there be a German Empire and a German voice in the councils of worldly government. Fritz Reuter lived to see his writings eagerly read from one end of Germany to the other. He lived to enjoy the honors of aristocratic governments, without yielding a jot of his independence; to find his boyish vagary of a united Germany a reality, and to see the colors, for the wearing of which he took such severe punishment in his youth, the emblem of German victory. He lived to receive the favor and encomium of the great German Chancellor, whose wit and humor, and whose appreciation of wit and humor and their attendant pathos, are said to be as profound as his statesmanship. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out, Reuter was a practical patriot to the marrow, albeit there is a tenderness in the little lyrics which he then wrote which shows how deeply he appreciated the private woes that find their hot-bed growth on the field of battle. In the latter years of his life, however, his malady crowded more persistently upon him. His later volumes, while marked at times with flashes of the fire that makes his writings so charming, still show that the foul fiend was at his elbow more frequently than ever. "Journey to Constantinople" is a bit of humorous romance, combining his own souvenirs of the tour made by him in 1864 with the comic adventures of two rival Mecklenburg families, who are supposed to make the excursion. It is only a half success, though in it there are still

The

traces of the old spirit. "Dörchlauchting" (His Little Serene Highness) also appeared at about this time.

In 1874 he died, in the full enjoyment of a personal and literary popularity which only genius and national sympathy could explain. He had acquired a moderate fortune by his works, and had been settled for some years before his death at Eisenach. The disease which ended his life was some affection of the heart; but his morbid passion for alcohol was probably the remote cause.

I have not been able, in the foregoing slight biography, and in the one of Groth, to give a clear outline of the Groth and Reuter influence upon German social literature. The limits of a magazine article have already been too far trespassed upon. Nor have I, in either of the two Plattdeutsch essays, paid such regard to the bibliography of the two authors as, in these days of exact information, befits a review in any branch of literature. I must, however, refer the reader to Adolph Wilbrandt's biography of Reuter, to which I am indebted for most of the facts of Reuter's life. If one were to give an account of the Plattdeutsch reading clubs and social organizations that have sprung into existence in the last twenty years, it would be almost a literary history of North Germany. No such enthusiasm for any given branch of literature has been stirred since the days when Petrarch, Boccaccio, and their contemporaries labored for the spread of classical learning.

I must close this article, however, by saying that, if it seems to an English reader bold and unwarrantable in its enthusiasm, it is because I cannot bring Reuter out of the field in which he has flourished any more than I could transplant to California the oak which flourishes in his honor at Stavenhagen. One can bring across the ocean the hard, impenetrable pillars of Egypt; but the oak tree drops his leaves, and seems, after transportation, to be nothing but firewood.

I have a young friend, still in his nonage, who joins to an independently decided bias in matters of taste an endearing docility in matters of action; or, with less art, in a Polonian sense, though he knows what he wants to read, he submits to the parental choice of books up to a certain limit. That measure full, however, nature's reaction sets in; e. g., after a filial wrestle, during hours of toil-won leisure, with Herodotus, Rawlinson's, four volumes; Plutarch, Clough's, five volumes; Gibbon's Rome, Bohn's, seven volumes (Oscito referens!), he appeared before me one day with the light of triumph playing, as it were, in a nimbus about his head, waving a small pamphlet, upon which was "the counterfeit presentment of two brothers" engaged in mortal combat. A prairie on fire was the background; the legend was: 'The Rival Redheads, or The Bloody PuttyKnife."

"And now, Philip, my king,” cried the youth, "I shall wade knee-deep in gore!"

This gusto for the literature of the primalelder curse, while it struck me as piquant in one whose tender heart-God love him!-would hardly permit him to shoot blue rocks at a match, though in more generous sport he holds his own creditably with experienced Nimrods, impelled me to send him the accounts of Charlie Parkhurst, the woman stage-driver, which were going the rounds of the newspapers a few months ago, hoping that her bold slaughter of the road agent, "Sugarfoot," would lure him to cast an eye of partiality over the whole history of the intrepid Amazon. But, alas! academic shades had corrupted my luxuriator in dime novels; the Blimbers were upon my Samson, "with a weight heavy as frost." He now only cared for the past; paralleling all this pale modernity with the ruddier life of our precedent

fellow-worms; a habit of mind caught, perhaps, from the enforced Plutarch of his adolescence. His sole comment on the biography of Charlie Parkhurst was:

"She was nothing to Catalina de Erauso; she waded knee-deep in gore."

I was glad to perceive that amid the moldered lodges of the past he still retained his old criterion of excellence. I myself had experienced quite a thrill of interest in the solitary Rhode Island girl, who, close-mouthed and strong-wristed, beat men at their own weapons, in an hour of man-milliners, when it is propounded that women are only retained on sufferance in the few trades and callings considered suitable to them. Hence it was that, in my reply to my academician's letter, I asked curtly in a postscript:

"Who, in the name of the Prophet, is Catalina What's-her-name?"

To which he responded:

“The Monja-Alferez, the Nun-Ensign. Floreat, 1615, or thereabouts."

After this I came into possession of such details about the Doña de Erauso as made me much doubt her authentic existence; but since Don Maria de Ferrer edited her autobiography, and Don José de Saban y Blanco mentions her in his Tablas de la Historia de España, and a picture of her, painted by Pacheco in 1630, is still extant, we must needs accept her as a moral monster, good for a study in psychologi- | cal dissection, while we fervently trust the die that molded her has been broken long since. Save in inviolate modesty and a certain whimsical regard for effect, this Catalina had not the minutest quality of mind or heart belonging to a woman. She was brought up in a cloister of which her aunt was prioress, and where her parents doomed her to be immured for life. She submitted to conventual discipline till she was fifteen, when she began to perceive that, while the current of her being was dammed up into monastic stagnancy, it had the pulse and beat and precipitous leap of the torrent in it. The inner spirit did not sing, at the first movements of her discontent, with that distinctness which was to be desired. Like most of us, she knew better what she did not want than what she did. I say most of us, so as not to be invidious to the man who wrote, "I want to be an angel," who knew. Catalina could not say, "I want to be a soldier," as the obvious consequence of "I cannot be a nun." She even took the white veil, and her noviciate had almost expired, when a violent quarrel with a Sister showed her, as by inspiration, her true vocation. It appears that within the walls of the St. Sebastian l'Antiguo the church was decided

ly militant, for the climax of the dispute was a severe beating administered by the nun to the novice. After this affront Catalina knew that she was made to kill-not the offending nun, but such of the human race as should come under her terrible displeasure. Sent upon an errand to the prioress's cell, she found there the keys of the convent, much more precious to her at that moment than St. Peter's own. All the wild beast in her panted and gathered its muscles for the bound that was to give it liberty. With cool foresight Catalina filched, besides the keys, money, needles, thread, and scissors. When the great outer door of the convent swung together behind her, she ran, perfectly ignorant of what direction she was taking, till she reached a chestnut grove, in the sheltered depths of which she fashioned her boy's dress out of the nine full petticoats of woolen perpetuan which women wore in Spain in the year of grace 1600.

Thus equipped, she followed the first road haphazard to the town of Vittoria, and boldly hired herself as secretary to her uncle, who, however, had never seen his remarkable relative. He wished to educate her, but Catalina, feeling that she had no time to lose in that way, moved on to court, then held at Valladolid. Here, by one of her audacious caprices, she entered as page to the king's secretary, who was the patron of her family. She served this gentleman till, as might be expected, her poor old father arrived at his palace gate to beg the secretary's assistance in recovering the fugitive Catalina. That enterprising virgin, overhearing her father's sobs and entreaties, instantly hired a mule and was off for Bilboa. In that city she called herself Francisco de Loyola, and soon fell into disrepute to the extent of being imprisoned for a month on account of a quarrel. After two or three years of liberty, by a foolhardy freak that one readily comprehends, however, she went to St. Sebastian, attended mass at the church of her own convent, and spoke to her former mates, the nuns. They thought her a stranger youth: "Bien vestido et galan," she says in her journal. One dares not hazard openly the conjecture that this description of her appearance by herself forever establishes her sex. Later she joined the expedition against the Dutch, commanded by Don Luis Fernandez de Cordova, and managed to sail to the Spanish Indies on the ship commanded by a maternal uncle, of whom she seems to have had as many as the Popes of her century had nephews. In engagements with the Dutch fleet she first saw active service, where the rattle of shot, the groans of the dying, the braying music, the hot curses, woke the slumbering warlust in her, to rage unslaked, though more blood