insipid as Mrs. Stowe's production; but he altogether misses the
point, which is the effect on the people of a spirited defense of
those who had hitherto had no advocate.

Freytag has been called an opportunist, but the term should not be
considered one of reproach. It certainly was opportune that his great
work appeared at the moment when it was most needed, a moment of
discouragement, of disgust at everything high and low. It brought its
smiling message and remained to cheer and comfort. _The Journalists_,
too, was opportune, for it called attention to a class of men whose
work was as important as it was unappreciated. Up to 1848, the year of
the revolution, the press had been under such strict censorship that
any frank discussion of public matters had been out of the question.
But since then distinguished writers, like Freytag himself, had taken
the helm. Even when not radical, they were dreaded by the
reactionaries, and even Freytag escaped arrest in Prussia only by
hastily becoming a court official of his friend the Duke of
Saxe-Coburg and Gotha--within whose domains he already owned an estate
and was in the habit of residing for a portion of each year--and thus
renouncing his Prussian citizenship. Even Freytag's _Pictures from the
German Past_ may be said to have been opportune. Already, for a
generation, the new school of scientific historians--the Rankes, the
Wattenbachs, the Waitzs, the Giesebrechts--had been piling up their
discoveries, and collating and publishing manuscripts describing the
results of their labors. They lived on too high a plane for the
ordinary reader. Freytag did not attempt to "popularize" them by cheap
methods. He served as an interpreter between the two extremes. He
chose a type of facts that would have seemed trivial to the great
pathfinders, worked them up with care from the sources, and by his
literary art made them more than acceptable to the world at large. In