coming visible. Here, too, it may be, as in other cases, the Want of the age has first taken voice and shape in Germany: that change from Negation to Affirmation, from Destruction to Reconstruction, for which all thinkers in every country are now prepared, is perhaps already in action there. In the nobler Literature of the Germans, say some, lie the rudiments of a new spiritual era, which it is for this, and for succeeding generations to work out and realize. The ancient creative Inspiration, it would seem, is still possible in these ages; at a time when Skepticism, Frivolity, Sensuality, had withered Life into a sand desert, and our gayest prospect was but the false mirage, and even our Byrons could utter but a death-song or despairing howl, the Moses'-wand has again smote from that Horeb refreshing streams, towards which the better spirits of all nations are hastening, if not to drink, yet wistfully and hopefully to examine. If the older Literary History of Germany has the common attractions, which in a greater or less degree belong to the successive epochs of other such Histories, its newer Literature, and the historical delineation of this, has an interest such as belongs to no other." Carlyle acknowledges that this book of Madame de Staël has done away with the prejudices against the Germans. We send it forth in a new dress, with careful and copious annotatation, and hope it may prove a true guide to those who are seeking information in regard to a great people. O. W. WIGHT. NENE, 1859. CHAP. II.-Of the Manners and Characters of the Germans CHAP. I.-Why are the French unjust to German Literature?........ 145 CHAP. II. Of the Judgment formed by the English on the subject of CHAP. XXI.-Goetz of Berlichingen and the Count of Egmont.. CHAP. XXII.-Iphigenia in Tauris, Torquato Tasso, &c., &c............. PREFACE. 1st October, 1813., IN 1810, I put the manuscript of this work, on Germany, into the hands of the bookseller, who had published Corinne. As I maintained in it the same opinions, and preserved the same silence respecting the present government of the French, as in my former writings, I flattered myself that I should be permitted to publish this work also: yet, a few days after I had dispatched my manuscript, a decree of a very singular description appeared on the subject of the liberty of the press; it declared "that no work could be printed without having been examined by censors." Very well; it was usual in France, under the old régime, for literary works to be submitted to the examination of a censorship; the tendency of public opinion was then towards the feeling of liberty, which rendered such a restraint a matter very little to be dreaded; a little article however, at the end of the new regulation declared, "that wher the censors should have examined a work and permitted its publication, booksellers should be authorized to publish it, but that the Minister of the Police should still have a right to suppress it altogether, if he should think fit so to do." The meaning of which is, that such and such forms should be adopted until it should be thought fit no longer to abide by them: a law was not necessary to decree what was in fact the absence of all law; it would have been better to have relied simply upon the exercise of absolute power. My bookseller, however, took upon himself the responsibility of the publication of my book, after submitting it to the censors, and thus our contract was made. I came to reside within : forty leagues of Paris, to superintend the printing of the work, and it was upon this occasion that, for the last time, I breathed the air of France. I had, however, abstained in this book, as will be seen, from making any reflections on the political state of Germany I supposed myself to be writing at the distance of fifty years from the present time; but the present time will not suffer itself to be forgotten. Several of the censors examined my manuscript; they suppressed the different passages which I have now restored and pointed out by notes. With the exception, however, of these passages, they allowed the work to be printed, as I now publish it, for I have thought it my duty to make no alteration in it. It appears to me a curious thing to show what the work is, which is capable even now in France, of drawing down the most cruel persecution on the head of its author. At the moment when this work was about to appear, and when the ten thousand copies of the first edition had been actually printed off, the Minister of the Police, known under the name of General Savary, sent his gensdarmes to the house of the bookseller, with orders to tear the whole edition in pieces, and to place sentinels at the different entrances to the warehouses, for fear a single copy of this dangerous writing should escape. A commissary of police was charged with the superintendence of this expedition, in which General Savary easily obtained the victory; and the poor commissary, it is said, died of the fatigue he underwent in too minutely assuring himself of the destruction of so great a number of volumes. or rather in seeing them transformed into paper perfectly white upon which no trace of human reason remained; the price of the paper, valued at twenty louis by the police, was the only indemnification which the bookseller obtained from the min ister. At the same time that the destruction of my work was going on at Paris, I received in the country an order to deliver up The copy from which it had been printed, and to quit France in four-and-twenty hours. The conscripts are almost the only persons I know for whom four-and-twenty hours are considered |