[Rheinische Zeitung No. 3, January 3, 1843] 

The lady of Augsburg has reached the stage when the fair sex 
itself no longer dares to simulate youth, and now has no more 
terrible accusation to make against her sisters than that of youth. 
In No. 360, however, the worthy Sibyl’s means of estimating age 
has surprisingly misled her. She speaks about a cooling off of the 
“youthful ardour” of the Rheinische Zeitung in connection with a 
correspondent who happens to be a sexagenarian and could hardly 
have expected to find a testimonial to his youth in the columns of 
the Augsburg Allg. Zeitung. But that is what happens! Freedom is 
sometimes too old, sometimes too young; it is never on the order 
of the day, at any rate not on that of the Augsburg Allg. Zig., 
which is more and more emphatically rumoured to be published 
in Augsburg. 

[Rheinische Zeitung No. 12, January 12, 1843] 

If the editorial board of the Rheinische Zeitung desired to add to 
the above correspondence a postscript in the manner of the Allg. 
A. Ztg., since she was so kind as to recognise the ensign Pistol in the 
Rheinische Zeitung, we could only give her a choice between Doll 
Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly. Her manly confession of faith, how- 
ever, we would expect from the friend of those ladies, from Falstaff: 

“Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour pricks me off when I come on? 
how then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an armr No. Or take away the grief of 
a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. 
What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim ae: Who 
hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it 
insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? 
Detraction will not suffer it: —-therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon, 
and so ends my catechism.”* 

2 W. Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part One, Act V, Scene 1.— Ed. 

Thus, too, ends the political catechism of the Augsburg A. Z.; 
thus she reminds the press that one could lose arm and leg in 
critical times, thus she detracts from honour, because she has 
renounced any honour which could be detracted from. 

The Augsburg A. Z. promised to engage us in a fight over 
principles and she has kept her promise. She has used no 
principles, hence her principles, against us in the struggle. Now 
and again she has assured us of her indignation, cast petty 
suspicions, attempted minor corrections, made a big show of small 
performance, and laid claim to superiority of age. In regard to 
this last point, to her title of veteran, we could say what M. Dézamy 
says to M. Cabet: 

“Que monsieur Cabet ait bon courage: avec tant de titres, il ne peut manquer 
d’obtenir bientét ses invalides!”* 

Madame Augsburg survives because of a mistake in calculation, 
an anachronism. Form, the only thing she possessed in earlier days, 
even form, the parfum littéraire, she has lost. It has been replaced 
by a philistine, diffuse and arrogant formlessness, and no one is 
likely to regard the platitude of “Herr Puff” and the simile of 
“the bullfrog that tried to blow itself up into an ox” as elegant 
because he finds the same sort of thing in the Augsburg A. Z.