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“‘It is highly deserving of notice,’ says Vasari, ‘that all those who studied in the gardens of the Medici, and were favoured by Lorenzo, became most excellent artists, which can only be attributed to the exquisite judgment of this great patron of their studies.’”[14]
Frederick II is another example of the union of refined tastes with vigorous energy. It is not so much for his military genius that he is to be remembered and respected, as for the impulse he gave to Prussian intellect, and thence generally to German mind.
It is true this was hardly perceptible till the present century, for until the peace of 1815, Germany had been the seat of almost incessant warfare, and was, therefore, disabled from pursuing the arts of peace with success. But thirty years’ peace has enabled her to perform great things, and to justify a pretty sure hope of yet greater. We ought to be far in advance of her, for where she now is we were exactly two hundred and fifty years and upwards ago. Till the reign of Elizabeth, England had been, like Germany till 1815, the seat of perpetual war or religious discord. At the end of the sixteenth century in England, and at the beginning of the nineteenth in Germany, the Teutonic mind began to develope itself with effect. The same deep investigations in history, the same subtle disquisitions in metaphysics, the same love of philological criticism that distinguished English literature in the early part of the seventeenth century, belong to German literature in the nineteenth, and are combined with the same coarseness of manners that marked our ancestors. The Germans still delight in those rude, indecent productions, called Miracle-plays or Mysteries,[15] which amused the predecessors of Shakspere: a written character, ugly, uncouth, and elsewhere obsolete; the recent adoption of the vernacular in literary composition;[16] legalized wager of battle; semi-feudalism; masques of fools dancing in a gigantic beer-barrel and chanting the praises of beer; deer-battues; perpetual duelling and beer-swigging; feasts of horse-flesh; millions pilgrimaging to the Coat of Treves; the implicit reception of sham miracles, all mark a state of society little removed from that magnificent barbarism which stained the rush-strewn court of the ear-boxing and swearing Elizabeth.