Page:The grand tour in the eighteenth century by Mead, William Edward.djvu/43

, the Dark Ages were prolonged down to the end of the eighteenth century, and it was there that the character of the Neapolitan people was moulded."

Other features of Italian life will receive attention in the proper place, but this rapid sketch is sufficient to make clear the general condition of the country that the tourist had to traverse.

Very different from France, and yet in all ranks of polite society the persistent imitator of everything French, was Germany. The well-informed man of to-day naturally thinks of Germany as the greatest military power in the world, as the home of the most advanced scholarship, and as the formidable commercial rival of England. Far lower in the eighteenth century was the international reputation of Germany. All through the period we are examining, Germany was not a compact nation, but a bewildering congeries of disunited kingdoms and electorates and principalities and free cities, with one portion — the Electorate of Brandenburg — gradually rising to preëminence as the new Kingdom of Prussia.

There is, indeed, no more confused and complicated history when taken in detail than that of Germany, for where there is no unity there can be no clearly defined policy and no general continuity of growth. With the historical development of Germany we cannot here deal. We have rather to endeavor to form some conception of what was connoted by the term "Germany" in the eighteenth century and to indicate the type of civilization it presented.

In the Middle Ages, Germany held a commanding position among the nations of Europe, with wealthy cities like Lübeck and Hamburg and Cologne and Nuremberg and Augsburg and Frankfort and Mainz and Strassburg and Breslau. But Germany at the beginning of the eighteenth century had long been declining. The Reformation and the animosities it engendered rent the Empire in twain