Here ill health, arising from excessive exertion, forced him to return: he had toiled faithfully till the struggle was decided; and could now, with a quiet mind, leave others to complete the task. By the King he was raised to the rank of Major, and decorated with the cross of the Order of St. John. He retired to his former residence at Rennhausen, near Rathenau; betook himself again to writing, with unabated diligence; and has since produced, among various other chivalry performances of greater or smaller extent, an "epic poem," entitled Corona, celebrating the events in which he himself was present, and formed part. Here, so far as I have understood, he still chiefly resides; enjoying an enviable lot; the domestic society of a virtuous and gifted wife; the exercise of a poetic genius, which his brethren repay with praise; and still dearer honours as a man and a citizen, which his own conscience may declare that he has merited. Fouque's genius is not of a kind to provoke or solicit much criticism; for its faults are negative rather than positive, and its beauties are not difficult to discern. The structure of his mind is simple; his intellect is in harmony with his feelings; and his taste seems to include few modes of excellence, which he has not in some considerable degree the power to realise. He is thus in unison with himself; his works are free from internal inconsistency, and appear to be produced with lightness and freedom. A pure sensitive heart, deeply reverent of Truth, and Beauty, and Heroic Virtue; a quick perception of certain forms embodying these high qualities; and a delicate and dainty hand in picturing them forth, are gifts which few readers of his works will contest him. At the same time, it must be granted, he has no preeminence in strength, either of head or heart; and his circle of activity, though full of animation, is far from comprehensive. He is, as it were, possessed by one idea. A few notes, some of them, in truth, of rich melody, yet still a very few, include the whole music of his being. The Chapel and the Tilt-yard stand in the background or the foreground, in all the scenes of his universe. He gives us knights, soft-hearted and strong-armed; full of Christian self-denial, patience, meekness and gay easy daring; they stand before us in their mild frankness, with suitable equipment, and accompaniment of squire and dame; and frequently the whole has a true, though seldom a vigorous, poetic life. If this can content us, it is well if not, there is no help; for change of scene and person brings little change of subject; even when no chivalry is mentioned, we feel too clearly the influence of its unseen presence. Nor can it be said, that in this solitary department his success is of the very highest sort. To body forth the spirit of Christian Knighthood in existing poetic forms; to wed that old sentiment to modern thoughts, was a task which he could not attempt. He has turned rather to the fictions

and machinery of former days; and transplanted his heroes into distant ages, and scenes divided by their nature from our common world. Their manner of existence comes imaged back to us faint and ineffectual, like the crescent of the setting moon.

These things, however, are not faults, but the want of merits. Where something is effected, it were ungracious to reckon up too narrowly how much is left untried. In all his writings, Fouqué shows himself as a man deeply imbued with feelings of religion, honour and brotherly love; he sings of Faith and Affection with a full heart; and a spirit of tenderness, and vestal purity, and meek heroism, sheds salutary influences from his presence. He is no primate or bishop in the Church Poetical; but a simple chaplain, who merits the honours of a small but well-discharged function, and claims no other.

In mental structure, Fouqué seems the converse of Musäus, whom he follows in the present volume. If Musäus was a man of talent, with little genius, Fouqué is a man of genius, with little more than an ordinary share of talent. His intellect is not richer or more powerful than that of common minds, nor his insight into the world and man's heart more keen; but his feelings are finer, and the touch of an aërial fancy gives life and loveliness to the products of his other powers. Among English authors, we might liken him to Southey; though their provinces of writing are widely diverse; and, in regard to general culture and acquirement, the latter must be reckoned greatly his superior. Like Southey, he finds more readily than he invents; and his invention, when he does trust to it, is apt to be daring rather than successful. Yet his extravagant fictions are pervaded by a true sentiment; a soft vivifying soul looks through them; a religious submission, a cheerful and unwearied patience in affliction; mild, earnest hope and love, and peaceful, subdued enthusiasm. To these internal endowments, he adds the merit of a style by no means ill adapted for displaying them. Lightness and simplicity are its chief characteristics: his periods move along in lively rhythm; studiously excluding all pomp of phraseology; expressing his strongest thoughts in the humblest words, and veiling dark sufferings or resolute purposes in a placid smile. A faint superficial gaiety seems to rest over all his images: it is not merriment or humour; but the self-possession of a man too earnestly serious to be heedful of solemn looks; and it plays like sunshine on the surface of a dark pool, deepening by contrast the impressiveness of the gloom which it does not penetrate.

If this little Tale of Aslauga's Knight1 afford any tolerable emblem of those qualities, the reader will not grudge perusing it. I pretend 1 Our only Translation from Fouqué.

not to offer it as the best of Fouqué's writings, but only as the best I know of for my present purpose. Sintram and Undine are already in our language: this tale is weaker in result, but also shorter in compass. That its chivalry is of a still wilder sort than that which we supposed Cervantes had abolished two centuries ago; that its form is thin and unsubstantial, and its effect unsatisfactory, I need not attempt to deny. An extravagant fiction for the basis; delicate, airy and beautiful delineations in the detail; and the everlasting principles of Faith, and Integrity, and Love, pervading the whole: such is frequently the character of Fouqué's writings; and such, on a smaller scale, appears to be that of Aslauga's Knight, which is now, with all its imperfections on its head, to be submitted to the courtesy of English judges.

LUDWIG TIECK.

LUDWIG TIECK, born at Berlin on the 31st of May 1773, is known to the world only as a Man of Letters, having never held any public station, or followed any profession, except that of authorship. Of his private history the critics and news-hunters of his own country complain that they have little information; a deficiency which may arise in part from the circumstance, that till of late years, though from the first admired by the Patricians of his native literature, he has stood in no high favour, and of course awakened no great curiosity, among the reading Plebs; and may indicate, at the same time, that in his walk and conversation, there is little wonderful to be discovered.

His literary life he began at Berlin, in his twenty-second year, by the publication of three Novels, following each other in quick succession: Abdallah, William Lovell and Peter Leberrecht. These works found small patronage at their first appearance, and are still regarded as immature products of his genius; the opening of a cloudy as well as fervid dawn; betokening a day of strong heat, and perhaps at last of serene brightness. A gloomy tragic spirit is said to reign throughout all of them; the image of a high passionate mind, scorning the base and the false, rather than accomplishing the good and the true; in rapt earnestness 'interrogating Fate,' and receiving no answer, but the echo of its own questions reverberated from the dead walls of its vast and lone imprisonment.

In this stage of spiritual progress, where so many not otherwise ungifted minds at length painfully content themselves to take up their permanent abode, where our own noble and hapless Byron perished from among us at the instant when his deliverance seemed at hand, it was not Tieck's ill fortune to continue too long. His Popu

lar Tales, published in 1797 as an appendage to his last Novel, under the title of Peter Leberrechts Volksmährchen, already indicate that he had worked his way through these baleful shades into a calmer and sunnier elevation; from which, and happily without looking at the world through a painted glass of any sort, he had begun to see that there were things to be believed, as well as things to be denied ; things to be loved and forwarded, as well as things to be hated and trodden under foot. The active and positive of Goodness was displacing the barren and tormenting negative; and worthy feelings were now to be translated into their only proper language, worthy actions. In Tieck's mind, all Goodness, all that was noble or excellent in Nature, seems to have combined itself under the image of Poetic Beauty; to the service and defence of which he has ever since unweariedly devoted his gifts and his days.

These Volksmährchen are of the most varied nature: sombre, pathetic, fantastic, satirical; but all pervaded by a warm, genial soul. which accommodates itself with equal aptitude to the gravest or the gayest form. A soft abundance, a simple and kindly but often solemn majesty is in them: wondrous shapes, full of meaning, move over the scene, true modern denizens of the old Fairyland; low tones of plaintiveness or awe flit round us; or a starry splendour twinkles down from the immeasurable depths of Night.

It is by this work, as revised and perfected long afterwards, that we now purpose introducing Tieck to the notice of the English reader: it was by this also that he was introduced to the notice of his countrymen. Peter Leberrechts Volksmährchen was reviewed by August Wilhelm Schlegel, in the Jena Litteraturzeitung; and its author, for the first time, brought under the eye of the world as a man of rich endowments, and in the fair way for turning them to proper account. To the body of the world, however, this piece of news was surprising rather than delightful; for Tieck's merits were not of a kind to split the ears of the groundlings, and his manner of producing them was ill calculated to conciliate a kind hearing. Schiller and Goethe were at this time silent, or occupied with History and Philosophy : Tieck belonged not to the existing poetic guild; and, far from soliciting admission, he had not scrupled, in the most pleasant fashion, to inform the craftsmen that their great Diana was a dumb idol, and their silver shrines an unprofitable thing. Among these Volksmährchen, one of the most prominent is Der gestiefelte Kater, a dramatised version of Puss in Boots; under the grotesque mask of which, he had laughed with his whole heart, in a true Aristophanic vein, at the actual aspect of literature; and without mingling his satire with personalities, or any other false ingredient, had rained it like a quiet shower of volcanic ashes on the cant of Illumination, the cant of

Sensibility, the cant of Criticism, and the many other cants of that shallow time, till the gumflower products of the poetic garden hung draggled and black under their unkindly coating. In another country, at another day, the drama of Puss in Boots may justly be supposed to appear with enfeebled influences; yet even to a stranger there is not wanting a feast of broad joyous humour in this strange phantasmagoria, where pit and stage, and man and animal, and earth and air, are jumbled in confusion worse confounded, and the copious, kind, ruddy light of true mirth overshines and warms the whole.

This What-d'ye-call-it of Puss in Boots was, as it were, the key-note which for several years determined the tone of Tieck's literary enterprises. The same spirit lives in his Verkehrte Welt (World turned Topsy-turvy), a drama of similar structure, which accompanied the former; in his tale of Zerbino, or the Tour in search of Taste, which soon followed it; and in numerous parodies and lighter pieces which he gave to the world in his Poetic Journal; the second and last volume of which periodical contains his Letters on Shakspeare, inculcating the same doctrines, in a graver shape. About this time, after a short residence in Hamburg, where he had married, he removed his abode to Jena; a change which confirmed him in his literary tendencies, and facilitated the attainment of their objects. It was here that he became acquainted with the two Schlegels; and, at the same time, with their friend Novalis, a young man of a pure, warm and benignant genius, whose fine spirit died in its first blossoming, and whose posthumous works it was, ere long, the melancholy task of Tieck and the younger Schlegel to publish under their superintendence. With Wackenroder of Berlin, a person of kindred mind with Novalis, and kindred fortune also, having died very early, Tieck was already acquainted and united; for he had coöperated in the Herzensergiessungen eines einsamen Klosterbruders, an elegant and impressive work on pictorial art, and Wackenroder's chief performance.

These young men sympathised completely in their critical ideas with Tieck; and each was labouring in his own sphere to disseminate them, and reduce them to practice. Their endeavours, it would seem, have prospered; for in colloquial literary history, this gifted cinquefoil, often it is only the trefoil of Tieck and the two Schlegels, have the credit, which was long the blame, of founding a New School of Poetry, by which the Old School, first fired upon in the Gestiefelte Kater, and ever afterwards assailed, without intermission, by eloquence and ridicule, argument and entreaty, was at length displaced and hunted out of being; or, like Partridge the Astrologer, reduced to a life which could be proved to be no life.

Of this New School, which has been the subject of much unwise talk, and of much not very wise writing, we cannot here attempt to