tween Schiller and Shakespeare: the readers of Shakespeare know that a thorough knowledge of the human heart produces the very finest poetry. We are mistaken, too, if the German poets be in general men of much feeling. This may seem paradoxical to those who have heard so much of German sentimentality; but we are inclined to think that this endless and disgusting whine about feeling, and the sympathy of souls, and the luxury of tears, and so forth, is the work of the imagination, not of the heart. Instead of being directed by feeling, they set themselves to conceive what would be pathetic on any occasion. Like a vulgar girl in some modern comedy, they do not know exactly how much it may be the fashion to cry for the death of an aunt,' and so they overdo the matter prodigiously. This is the grand fault of the German poets-and of none more than Goëthe-their nauseous parade of sensibility.

6

The Germans have two poems, (besides some smaller essays,) which they call epic, and we shall not be pedantical enough, after the example of Mad. de S., to dispute the title, the Oberon of Wieland, and the Messiah of Klopstock. Oberon has very few of the characteristics of German poetry. It is entirely a tale of chivalry and faërie, and much in the manner of Ariosto. Sir Huon, having grievously offended the Emperor Charlemagne, is sent out by him, at peril of perpetual banishment, on the following whimsical and hopeless enterprize. He is to break upon the feast of the Caliph of Bagdad-slay him who sits at the Caliph's left hand-kiss the lady at his right, and claim her for a bride-and finally request the trifling additional boon of four of the Caliph's teeth, and a lock of his grey beard. This, the reader immediately sees, is no mortal business,' no atchievement for a mere human arm. Sir Huon is the favourite of the wood-god Oberon, who has quarrelled with his Titania, and vowed never to see her again till he can meet with a pair of lovers faithful to one another in the extremities of distress. From Oberon Sir Huon receives fairy gifts, particularly a horn, at the mellow sound of which, every one who hears and is not conscious of perfect innocence, begins dancing. By means of this the knight sets the Caliph and his whole court a-capering, and finally accomplishes his purpose, carrying off the beautiful Regia, the Sultan's daughter, as his bride. Here the poem we think, should have ended, as a lively jeu d'esprit; but there are several long cantos yet. The lovers, as they are sailing homewards, offend their fairy friend, are deprived of the enchanted horn and bowl, thrown overboard by their ship's.

crew, cast on a desert island, and, after almost perishing there, and a long adventure with that most necessary of all poetical personages, a hermit, get different ways to Tunis. There new troubles await them, the Sultan falls in love with the one, and the Sultana with the other; they remain constant; and at length are bound to the stake, and are about to be burnt, when the capricious Oberon declares that they have been sufficiently tried, restores to them the fairy gifts, and brings them home to the court of Charlemagne, he himself being at last reconciled to Titania.

There is room here for tenderness and humour, for interest and description; yet Oberon does not very strongly take hold of the imagination or the feelings. The lovers are rather gross, and nothing can be imagined more heavy than the humour put into the mouth of Sherasmin. The versification of the translation is singularly cramped and embarrassed; it jolts and rumbles over a rough road, never glides down a smooth stream.

Mad. de S. calls the Messiah' a religious hymn.

'Christians,' she says, could before boast of two poems, the Inferno of Dante, and the Paradise Lost of Milton. The one was full of images and phantoms, like the external religion of the Italians: Milton, who had lived in the midst of civil wars, excelled particularly in painting character, and his Satan is a gigantic rebel, in arms against the monarchy of heaven. Klopstock has conceived Christianity in all its purity; it is to the Saviour of mankind that his soul is devoted. Dante had his inspiration from the fathers; Milton from the bible; the finest passages of Klopstock's poem are founded on the New Testament. Without diminishing the purity or simplicity of the gospel, he has drawn from it strains of the most charming poetry. When we begin this poem, we seem entering a grand cathedral, the organ pealing at a distance; and that tenderness and devotion which we feel in the temple of God we feel also in reading the Messiah.' Vol. I. p. 231.

'Much talent was required to excite an interest in an event already decided by an omnipotent will. Klopstock has united with great skill all the terror and all the hope that the fatality of Paganism and the providence of Christianity can inspire. There is but one episode of love in the whole work, and that is a love between two persons raised from the dead, Cidli and Semida. Jesus has restored them both to life, and they love one another with an affection pure and celestial as their new existence; they no longer believe themselves subject to death, and hope to pass together from earth to heaven without either of them experiencing the pain of separation: A touching conception of the only kind of love that could be in harmony with the ensemble of this religious poem. It must, however, be confessed that there is a little monotony in a subject so continually exalted: the mind is wearied by perpetual contemplation,

and the author is now and then fit only for such unearthly readers as Cidli and Semida.... There are too many speeches, and too long, in the Messiah: eloquence itself strikes the imagination less than a situation, a character, a picture, where something is left to fancy.' Vol. I. p. 299, 301.

་

The German dramatists are professedly of the free school. Without allowing themselves the same quantity of action and immeasurable length of time as the English and Spanish writers for the stage, they have nevertheless entirely thrown off the yoke of Aristotle and the French critics. With respect to the play-wrights of her own country, Mad. de Staël is very candid. She claims for them the praise of thorough skill in laying out a story for the stage, but she freely acknowledges the monotonous effect of a French tragedy. The French,' she observes, paint passion, the Germans character.' For instance, in the Iphigénie' of Racine, the model of tragic excellence, according to Voltaire, any lover in the place of Achilles, any father in the place of Agamemnon, would speak and act precisely as Achilles and Agamemnon do: the individuality of character is lost in the generality of passion. To paint character, one must necessarily throw off the majestic tone exclusively admitted in French tragedy.' And again to throw off this, one must throw off the pompous march of the rhyming alexandrines: we cannot in rolling alexandrines say simply that one is coming or going out, waking or falling asleep; all this must be poetically told, and a thousand sentiments and expressions are banished from the theatre, not by the rules of tragedy, but by the very versification.' (Vol. II. p. 12.) We want in France effect not only in every scene, but in every line; and this cannot be reconciled with truth. Nothing is easier than to write brilliant verses; there are moulds ready made for the purpose: the difficulty is to make each detail subordinate to the whole.' (Vol. II. p. 57.) Then again, the round of dramatic personages in France is extremely limited; -nothing but kings and queens and their confidents and confidantes, all exactly after the fashion of some approved archetypes, and all exactly like one another; and these too unrelieved,-not merely by comedy, but by any thing that approximates to the stillness and repose of humble life.

It is singular that of these two people it should be the French who require the most sustained gravity in the tone of tragedy: but it is precisely because the French are so accessible to pleasantry, that they cannot allow it here, while nothing disturbs the unconquerable gravity of the Germans; they alway

judge of a piece as a whole; and wait till it is finished, whether to applaud or blame. The impressions of the French are quicker: and it would be in vain to tell them that a comic scene is intended to give a greater effect to a succeeding tragic one; they would ridicule the one, without waiting for the other." Vol. II. p. 4.

In avoiding the errors of the French stage, it must, however, we think, be acknowledged that the Germans have pushed too far, and "fallen on the other side." They have, indeed, extended the range of character, but in so doing, have, as we observed before, often created beings which have no prototype in nature, and which, therefore, awake no interest in the reader. In descending from princes and princesses too, they have fallen 'plumb down,' and frequently come into the region of middling life. This is bad, because there is nothing poetical, no room for fancy in private life. For plain Mr. Talland or Mrs. Haller, to talk in verse, or to talk poetically is out of nature, and is immediately felt to be so, and therefore many of these dramas are written in prose, and with an equability of dialogue approaching to comedy. But, it will be said, can any thing be more affecting than scenes of misery which we know to be every day taking place around us? Perhaps not. Perhaps the death of Beverley may be made more pathetic than the madness of Lear, or the death of Desdemona: but what then? Is it therefore the more pleasing? By no means; for the imagination is not excited. Mad. de S. has very neatly observed, that these dramas are to tragedy, what wax-work is to sculpture; there is too much of truth and too little of the ideal.'

These remarks apply less to Schiller than to any other of the German dramatists. It is Kotzebue who principally writes these wax-work pieces, and it is Kotzebue whose dramas are chiefly known to the English. Goëthe is an author who delights in tyrannizing over the public mind, bringing one style of poetry into fashion that he may laugh it out again, and indulging himself in all the freaks of the most wayward imagination.

It is obviously impossible for us to follow Mad. de S. through all her details upon German literature. The dramatists are pretty well known in England; so is Oberon; so are Bürger's tales of terror. The Messiah is miserably done into English by a Mrs. Collyer, and a Mrs. Meeke: these ladies may know German, but assuredly they are not acquainted with English. In comedy the Germans do not seem to excel; they are too unacquainted with the world

to be well-skilled in the delicate and almost imperceptible shades of human character. Their pleasantry is gross and farcical, and certainly not well adapted to a Parisian taste.

Here we could willingly leave Mad. de Staël. Here indeed we wish that she had left her subject. Character, national as well as individual-the spirit of society-conversation--all this fell peculiarly within the province of a woman; and elegant literature, poetry and the drama, were the business of any mind as cultivated as Mad. de Staëls. But metaphysics-we can now only wish that she had let metaphysics alone. She tells us indeed, (Vol. III. p. 4.) that slie does not meddle with the examination of metaphysical theories, but only busies herself with observing what influence such or such an opinion may have upon the developement of the faculties. This declaration we had passed over, till, in going through the chapters on English, French and German philosophy, we found ourselves forcibly put in mind of it, by meeting there with nothing like philosophical discussion, no account of any system whatever-Locke's idealism, Hartley's vibratiuncles, Malebranche's ideas seen in the divine mind, Leibnitz's monads,-no explication of all these fancies, but, instead of it, declamation on the degrading nature of the doctrine of materialism, on the infallibility of the moral sense, on the perfectibility of the human species, Mad. de Staël is very eloquent; and undoubtedly eloquence is a very good thing, probably a much better thing than metaphysics; so is a blanket than a muslin dress; nevertheless, if we met with a lady who had nothing but a blanket to wrap round herself, we should advise her not to venture within the precincts of a ball-room.

We are continually obliged to believe that our author is criticizing books that she has not read, and theories with which she is unacquainted. Thus she always speaks of the ideal philosophy as leading by the directest road to materialism, whereas every one knows, that in its frightful march towards annihilation, the material world is the first object that it overthrows. Mad. de S. contents herself with exclaiming most vehemently against the sad ravages of this idealism. Would it not have been better to have read the works of Reid, and to have learnt how to combat and conquer and annihilate the monster? Locke asserts that all our ideas are either from sensation or reflection; Reid, after shewing that the division is unphilosophical, (though we think that, to make out his point, he a little misunderstands Locke,) brings forward many notions that cannot possibly have their rise either in our perception of external nature, or in our