character, not so much vague and gigantic as altogether void and boundless. A feeling as of desert vastness steals over us in what appeared to be a common scene; or in high passages, a fire as of a furnace glows in one small spot, under the infinitude of darkness: Immensity and Eternity seem to rest over the bounded and quicklyfading.

His mind we should call well cultivated; for no part of it seems stunted in its growth, and it acts in soft unimpeded union. His heart seems chastened in the school of experience; fervid, yet meek and humble, heedful of good in mean forms, and looking for its satisfaction not in passive, but in active enjoyments. His poetical taste seems no less polished and pure with all his mental riches and excursiveness, he merits in the highest degree the praise of chaste simplicity, both in conception and style. No man ever rejected more carefully the aid of exaggeration in word and thought, or produced more result by humbler means. Who could have supposed that a tragedy, no mock-heroic, but a real tragedy, calculated to affect and excite us, could have been erected on the groundwork of a nursery tale ? Yet let any one read Blaubart in the Phantasus, and say whether this is not accomplished. Nor is Tieck's history of our old friend Bluebeard any Fairyland George Barnwell; but a genuine play, with comic as well as tragic life in it; a group of earnest figures, painted on a laughing ground,' and surprising us with poetical delight, where we looked for anything sooner.

In his literary life, Tieck has essayed many provinces, both of the imaginative and the intellectual world; but his own peculiar province seems to be that of the Mährchen; a word which, for want of a proper synonym, we are forced to translate by the imperfect periphrase of Popular Traditionary Tale. Here, by the consent of all his critics, including even the collectors of real Mährchen, he reigns without any rival. The true tone of that ancient time, when man was in his. childhood, when the universe within was divided by no wall of adamant from the universe without, and the forms of the Spirit mingled and dwelt in trustful sisterhood with the forms of the Sense, was not easy to seize and adapt with any fitness of application to the feelings of modern minds. It was to penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination, where human passion and action are reflected in dim and fitful, but deeply significant resemblances, and to copy these with the guileless humble graces which alone can become them. Such tales ought to be poetical, because they spring from the very fountains of natural feeling; they ought to be moral, not as exemplifying some current apophthegm, but as imaging forth in shadowy emblems the universal tendencies and destinies of man. That Tieck has succeeded thus far in his Tales is not asserted by his

warmest admirers; but only that he now and then approaches such success, and throughout approaches it more closely than any of his rivals.

How far this judgment of Tieck's admirers is correct, our readers are now to try for themselves.1 Respecting the reception of these Tales, I cannot boast of having any very certain, still less any very flattering presentiment. Their merits, such as they have, are not of a kind to force themselves on the reader; and to search for merits few readers are inclined. The ordinary lovers of witch and fairy matter will remark a deficiency of spectres and enchantments here, and complain that the whole is rather dull. Cultivated freethinkers again, well knowing that no ghosts or elves exist in this country, will smile at the crackbrained dreamer, with his spelling-book prose and doggrel verse, and dismiss him good-naturedly as a German Lakepoet. Alas! alas! Ludwig Tieck could also fantasy, 'like a drunk Irishman,' with great conveniency, if it seemed good to him; he can laugh too, and disbelieve, and set springes to catch woodcocks in manifold wise: but his present business was not this: nor, I fear, is the lover of witch matter, or the cultivated freethinker, likely soon to discover what it was.

Other readers there are, however, who will come to him in a truer and meeker spirit, and, if I mistake not, be rewarded with some touches of genuine poetry. For the credit of the stranger, I ought to remind them that he appears under many disadvantages. In the process of translation he has necessarily lost, and perhaps in more than the usual proportion; the childlike character of his style was apt to diverge into the childish; the nakedness of his rhymes, perhaps at first only wavering between simplicity and silliness, must in my hands too frequently have shifted nearer the latter. Above all, such works as his come on us unprepared; unprovided with any model2 by which to estimate them, or any category under which to arrange them. Nevertheless, the present specimens of Tieck do exhibit some features of his mind; a few, but those, as it seems to me, its rarest and highest features to such readers, and with such allowances, the Runenberg, the Trusty Eckart and their associates may be commended with some confidence.

1 The Tales translated from Tieck are: 1. The Fairhaired Eckbert; 2. The Trusty Eckart; 3. The Runenberg; 4. The Elves; 5. The Goblet.

2 I have not forgotten Allan Cunningham's Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry; a work full of kind fancy and soft glowing exuberance, and with traces of a genius which might rise into a far loftier and purer element than it has ever yet moved and lived in.

E. T. W. HOFFMANN.

HOFFMANN's Life and Remains have been published, shortly after his decease, and with an amplitude of detail corresponding rather to the popularity, than to the intrinsic merit, of the subject; for Hoffmann belongs to that too numerous class of vivid and gifted literary men, whose genius, never cultured or elaborated into purity, finds loud and sudden, rather than judicious or permanent admiration ; and whose history, full of error and perplexed vicissitude, excites sympathising regret in a few, and unwise wonder in many. From this Work, which is honestly and modestly enough written, aud has, to all appearance, been extensively read and approved of, I borrow most of the following particulars.

Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann was born at Königsberg, in Prussia, on the 24th of January 1776. His father occupied a post of some dignity in the administration of Justice; the mother's relatives were also engaged in the profession of Law; most of them respectably, some of them with considerable influence and reputation. The elder Hoffmann is said to have been a man of talent; but his temper and habitudes were irregular; his wife was sickly, sensitive and perhaps querulous and uncompliant: in our Ernst their second child's third year, the parents discovered that they could not live together; and, apparently by mutual consent, dissolved their illassorted union. The father withdrew from Königsberg, to prosecute his legal and judicial engagements elsewhere; and seems to have troubled himself no farther about his offspring or old connexions: he died, several years after, at Insterburg, where he had been stationed. as a Judge in the Criminal Court of the Oberland. The other parent retired with young Ernst to her mother's house, also in Königsberg; and there, in painful inaction, wore out seventeen sick and pitiable years, before death put a period to her sufferings. Prior to the separation, the elder child, also a boy, had gone astray into wicked courses, and at last set forth as an infant prodigal into the wide world. The two brothers never met, though the elder is said to be still in life.

Cut off from his natural guardians and directors, young Hoffmann seems to have received no adequate compensation for the want of them, and his early culture was but ill conducted. The grandmother, like her daughter, was perpetually sick, neither of the two almost ever stirring from their rooms. An uncle, retired with the barren title of Justizrath from an abortive practice of Law, took charge of the boy's education: but little Otto had no insight into the endowments or perversities of his nephew, and spent much fruitless

effort in endeavouring to train the frolicsome urchin to a clock-work life like his own; for Otto lived by square and rule; his history was a rigid, strenuous, methodical procedure; of which, indeed, except the process of digestion, faithfully enough performed, the result, in Otto's case, was nothing. An unmarried aunt, the only other member of the family, the only member of it gifted with any share of sense, appears to have had a truer view of young Hoffmann; but she loved the little rogue too well; and her tenderness, though repaid by equal and continued tenderness on his part, perhaps hurt him more than the leaden constraint of his uncle. For the rest, the boy did not let the yoke lie too heavy on his shoulders: Otto, it is true, was his teacher, his chamber-mate and bed-mate; but every Thursday the little Justizrath went out to pay visits, and the pupil could then celebrate a day of bedlam jubilee in a little while too, by superiority of natural cunning, he had sounded the Justizrath; and from his twelfth year, we are told, he scarcely ever spoke a word with him, except for purposes of mystification. In this prim circle, he grew up in almost complete isolation; for, by reason of its fantastic strictness, the household was visited by few; and except one boy, a nephew of the Author Hippel's, with whom he accidentally became acquainted, Hoffmann had no companion but his foolish uncle and his too fond aunt. With young Hippel his intimacy more and more increased; and it is pleasant to record of both, that this early connexion continued unbroken, often warm and helpful, through many changes of fortune; Hoffmann's school-friend stood by his death-bed, and took his farewell of him with true heartfelt tears.

For classical instruction, he was early sent to the public school of Königsberg; but till his thirteenth or fourteenth year, he acquired no taste for these pursuits; and remained unnoticed by his teacher, and by all his schoolfellows, except Hippel, rather disrespected and disliked. Music and painting, in which also he had masters, were more to his taste: in a short while, he could fantasy to admiration on the harpsichord; and there was no comic visage in Königsberg which he had not sketched in caricature. His tiny stature (for in youth, as in manhood, he was little, and 'incredibly brisk') giving him an almost infantile appearance, added new wonder to these attainments; and so young Ernst became a musical and pictorial prodigy; to the no small comfort of Justizrath Otto, who delighted to observe that the little imp who had played him so many sorry tricks, and so often overset the steady machinery of his household economy, was turning out not a blackguard, but a genius.

With more prudence and regularity than could have been expected, Hoffmann betook himself, in due time, to preparing for the legal profession; to which, as if by hereditary destiny, he was ap

pointed. In the Königsberg University, indeed, he confessed that Kant's prelections were a dead letter to him, though it was at that time the fashion both for the wise and simple to be metaphysically transcendental: but he abstained from the riotous practices of his fellow-bürschen, and pursued with strict fidelity the tasks by which he hoped ere long to gain an independent livelihood, and be delivered from the thraldom of his grandmother and Justizrath Otto. In this hope he laboured; allowing himself no recreation, except once a-week an evening of literary talk with his fellow-student Hippel, and an occasional glance into Winkelmann, or other works on Art, to which, as formerly, the better part of his nature was passionately devoted.

In 1795, he passed his first professional trial, and was admitted Auscultator of the Court of Königsberg: an establishment administrative as well as judicial; in which, however, owing to the pressure of applicants, it was impossible to give him full employment. This leisure, which, with so hot and impatient a spirit, hung heavy enough. on his hands, he endeavoured to fill up with subsidiary pursuits: he gave private lessons in music; he painted wild landscapes, or grotesque figures, to which 'a bold alternation of colour and shade' gave a specific character; he talked of men and things, with the most sportful fancy, or the most biting sarcasm: in fine, he wrote two Novels. One of these, at least, he had hoped to see in print; for a bookseller had received it with some expressions of encouragement: but after half a year, his fair manuscript was returned to him all soiled and creased, with an answer, that 'the anonymity of the work was likely to hurt its sale.' In the mean time, his situation had become still more perplexed by a private incident in the style of the Nouvelle Heloise. One of his fair music-pupils was too lovely and too soft-hearted no marriage could be thought of between the parties, for she was far above him in rank; and the contradictions and entanglements of this affair so pained and oppressed him, that he longed with double vehemence to be out of Königsberg. At last, after much wavering and consulting, he snatched himself away, with a resolute, indeed almost heroic effort, from the unpropitious scene; and proceeded, in the summer of 1796, to Great Glogau in Silesia, where another uncle, a brother of Otto's, occupied a post in the Adminis tration, and had promised to procure him employment.

In Great Glogau he did not find the composure which he was in search of; his uncle and his cousins treated him with great affection, and his labour was not irksome or unprofitable; but, in his letters, he complains incessantly of tedium, and other spiritual maladies; and, in 1798, he joyfully took leave of Silesia, following his uncle, who was now promoted to a higher legal post in Berlin. Here too the young jurist continued only for a short time. Having passed his