CONTENTS OF VOLUME IV. COMPLETE BOOKS AND IMPORTANT PIECES. PAGE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PORTRAITS. (Boccaccio, Mark Twain, and Samuel Lover). Frontispiece. ENGRAVINGS ON WOOD. TWENTY-SEVEN ILLUSTRATIONS FOR REYNARD THE FOX. Designed by William Kaul- WIT THE LIBRARY OF AND HUMOR. REYNARD THE FOX. TRANSLATED BY THOMAS ARNOLD FROM school which has given to Germany some of its most enduring fictions. Its celebrity, however, is European; and, translated into almost every language, it has become a native of many lands. This is, however, no place for entering upon the criticism of a poem like the Reynard of Goethe, which was published in 1793, while the French Revolution was at its height, a biting commentary on that fearful time. Books of such significance descend into the depths of the soul without the dead weight of the critic's laudation being attached to them. Such a work to be adequately represented to the present age, required the hand of a master who should unite with the grave wisdom of the acute and experiThe story of REYNARD THE Fox, here presented to the American public in the Translation of Mr. Arnold, of the better kind of critic; such a combination preenced man of the world, the happy and playful facility is one which has been famous for centuries. The earliest edition known of this remarkable work is pre- naturally to be expected. sented itself in GOETHE: such a book the product served in the Grenville Library at the British Museum, later centuries blend most opportunely with the an. The enlarged views of and is supposed to be a unique copy; it is a black letter tique form, and under the veil of animals the symbolic octavo in Dutch, and was printed at Gouda, near Rot- representations of the diverse passions of men stand terdam, in 1479. Upon this work was based the trans-boldly in relief, creations as real as many passing forms lation of William Caxton, published in 1481. This first which, like mirror-shadows, endure not. English REYNARD is also extremely rare, only three copies being known, of which two are in the British Museum; it is, however, easy of reference, having been reprinted by the Percy Society in 1844. The first German version was published at Lübeck in 1498, but the origin of the legend is much more remote, the poem having been known in Low German, French, and Latin, even in the twelfth century. At the present day, it is impossible to trace the authorship of the oldest version, referred by some to Willem die Matoc; but a Reinhart Fuchs is still preserved, dating about the middle of the thirteenth century, and it would seem that the earliest traces of the Poem must be sought in Flanders, where the nucleus of the series of adventures was formed. Henry von Alkmar, who was in the service of the Duke of Lorraine, is stated. in the Preface to the Lübeck Edition, to be the first who translated the story from the Italian and French into German; but other authorities refer the authorship to a certain Nicholas Baumann, who died at Rostock in 1526, and the motive of his writing the Poem is stated to have been revenge for the persecution with which he was visited at the Court of Jülich. Yet the story was evidently not of his invention, therefore he must only be regarded as one of the numerous editors. Its earliest public seems to have been the same which received with avidity the Eulenspiegel legend, the Lay of the Niebelungen, the Ship of Fools of Sebastian Brandt, and similar productions-and in its general satiric views of mankind it belongs especially to the grotesque VOL. IV.-W. H. One of the specialities of the present edition concountry, of the wonderful engravings of Kaulbach, sists in the reproduction. for the first time in this who seized upon the spirit of Goethe's design, and aswitch's spell, transformed men into their brute synosumed with a happy facility the mood, which, as by a nyms. Reared into artistic power, under the careful eye of Cornelius, Wilhelm von Kaulbach was of the foremost men of Germany in art. At an early period he distinguished himself in sarcastic and huwhether the pictorial epic of Reynard was not an early moresque drawing, and it would be curious to know conception in the artist's mind, cherished there as only cuted in enthusiastic leisure. true and wished-for designs can be cherished, and exe one The work, in its original quarto form, appeared in 1846, and has obtained for Kaulbach an ineffaceable reputation. So great was the popularity of that edition, that, in 1857, a reduction in the size of the engravings was made, and the Poem republished by Cotta. From this smaller book the present edition has originated. 1 |