Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/247

Rh child's unavertable inheritance of the parents' vices or virtues. This Töpfer has refuted, with much feeling and earnestness. He has, in most of his smaller novels, merely endeavored blamelessly to amuse himself and others; and in this he has succeeded. I would defy the most sullen disposition to read Le Col d'Anterne, and many others of this class, without being betrayed by them into hearty peals of laughter.

Bitzins is an author of higher pretension. Although he, also, is a genre painter, yet his figures are more peculiar and living; they are drawn from reality; his earnestness is deeper; his humor more keen, often even bitter. He belongs to German Switzerland, and has written, under the pseudonym of “Jeremias Gotthelf,” novels and romances in German, which wholly describe peasant life and manners, especially in the Canton Berne, where he holds a living. He is said not to be the best of spiritual shepherds; his descriptions, however, of popular life, are excellent. That which Fielding and Hogarth were in their own country, Bitzins is for Switzerland. He exhibits the low and laughable, rather than the good, in human nature; but when he does the latter, it takes a strong hold upon the heart. Besides, every one of his pictures is true to nature, naïve, living. He is a great artist, of the Flemish school.

Whilst we, in our little circle, were living on, in our quiet way, the whole of Switzerland was arming itself for war. The revolution of Neufchâtel, that “tempest in a glass of water,” had produced its serious consequences, and far greater than many people expected. Prussia appeared in arms against