on all occasions.

The opinion -- entirely foreign to any intention of the
author -- that Hans Breitmann is an embodied satire on everything
German, has found very few supporters, and it is with the
greatest gratification that he has learned that educated and
intelligent Germans regard Hans as a jocose burlesque of a type
which is every day becoming rarer. And if Teutonic philosophy
and sentiment, beer, music, and romance, have been made the
medium for what many reviewers have kindly declared to be
laughter-moving, let the reader be assured that not a single word
was meant in a bitter or unkindly spirit. It is true that there
is always a standpoint from which any effort may be misjudged,
but this standpoint certainly did not occur to the writer when he
wrote, with anything but misgiving, of his "hearty,
hard-fighting, good-natured old ex-student," who, in the
political ballads and others, appears to no moral disadvantage by
the side of his associates.

Breitmann in several ballads is indeed a very literal copy
or combination of characteristics of men who really exist or
existed, and who had in their lives embraced as many extremes of
thought as the Captain. America abounds with Germans, who,
having received in their youth a "classical education," have
passed through varied adventures, and often present the most
startling paradoxes of thought and personal appearance. I have
seen bearing a keg a porter who could speak Latin fluently. I
have been in a beer-shop kept by a man who was distinguished in
the Frankfurt Parliament. I have found a graduate of the
University of Munich in a negro minstrel troupe. And while