The hopes of the King and Queen of Bavaria, thus unluckily commemorated by these monuments, were no less at that time the hopes and the belief of all Europe—with what little of prophetic spirit full twenty years of experience has shown. Greece, swarming with Bavarian adventurers, till goaded to the utmost she drove them from her bosom; Greece, bankrupt, apathetic, and ungrateful; a Greek port blockaded by the ships of her first defender, and her vessels held in pawn for the payment of a miserable debt; Greece, piratical, dissembling, and rebellious, aiding in her weak and greedy ambition the worst enemy of Europe—so runs the story—but Greek deliverance not yet. Her joint occupation by French and English forces, and the possible imposition of a provisional government, may indeed lead to the unprophesied consummation—her deliverance—from King Otho.
No doubt, those monuments of mingled weakness and arrogance still whiten in the air; as for us, we continued our march towards the Bavarian capital, slept at a pilgrimage church that night, and on the following morning made a bargain with the driver of a country cart who had overtaken us, and seated on the rough timber which formed his load, jolted into Munich.
King Louis then reigned in Bavaria, but being so indifferent a prophet could not foresee his own speedy abdication.
The original stuff out of which a French workman is made, is a street boy of fourteen years old, or, perhaps, twelve. That young _gamin de Paris_ can sing as many love ditties and drinking songs as there are hairs upon his head, before he knows how much is nine times seven. He prefers always the agreeable to the useful: he knows how to dance all the quadrilles: he knows how to make grimaces of ten thousand sorts one after the other without stopping, and at the rate of twenty in a minute. Of his other attainments, I say little. It is possible that he may have been to one of the elementary schools set up by the Government; or, it may be that he knows not how to read; although, by Article 10 of a law passed in eighteen hundred and thirty-three, it was determined that no chief town of a department, or chief place of a commune, containing more than six thousand inhabitants, should be without at least one elementary school for public instruction.