But popular experience declares that the children of men of genius are dunces: how is this to be reconciled with the doctrine of hereditariness? A decisive answer cannot be given; but we may suggest that there is some confusion inevitably arising from the exaggerated demands made upon the children of a man of genius; and from our not taking into account the rarity of genius as a phenomenon, which rarity points to a peculiarity in the confluence of circumstances not likely to be transmitted. I am not so certain that these much decried children have been dunces. If they have seemed insignificant when compared with their fathers, they would have been estimated quite otherwise had their position been otherwise; and the man who, bearing an illustrious name, seems unworthy of the burthen, would be lauded by biographers as a man of considerable merit, had he been the father instead of the son of a genius.*

There is consequently a philosophic interest aiding a natural curiosity in the inquiry into Goethe's ancestry. That he had inherited his organization and tendencies from his forefathers, and could call nothing in himself original, he has told us in these verses:

Vom Vater hab' ich die Statur,

Des Lebens ernstes Führen;

- Von Mütterchen die Frohnatur,
Und Lust zu fabuliren.
Urahnherr war der Schönsten hold,
Das spukt so hin und wieder ;
Urahnfrau liebte Schmuck und Gold,

Das zuckt wohl durch die Glieder.

* In our own day, Byron, Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt, were the fathers of children remarkable even among the remarkable and Shelley's son has faculties which would have distinguished any one bearing a less onerous name.

Sind nun die Elemente nicht,

Aus dem Complex zu trennen,
Was ist denn an dem ganzen Wicht
Original zu nennen ? '*

The first glimpse we get of his ancestry is about the middle of the seventeenth century. In the Grafschaft of Mansfeld in Thuringia, the little town of Artern numbered among its scanty inhabitants a farrier, by name Hans Christian Goethe. His son, Frederick, being probably of a more meditative turn, selected a more meditative employment than that of shoeing horses. He became a tailor. Having passed an apprenticeship, (not precisely that of Wilhelm Meister,) he commenced his Wanderings, in the course of which he reached Frankfurt. Here he soon found employment, and being, as we learn, a ladies' man,' he soon also found a wife. The master tailor, Sebastian Lutz, gave him his daughter, on his admission to the citizenship of Frankfurt and to the guild of tailors. This was in 1687. Several children were born, and vanished; in 1700 his wife, too, vanished, to be replaced,

*From my father I inherit my frame, and the steady guidance of life; from dear little mother my happy disposition, and love of story-telling. My ancestor was a "ladies' man," and that haunts me now and then; my ancestress loved finery and show, which also runs in the blood. If, then, the elements are not to be separated from the whole, what can one call original in the descendant?'

This is a very inadequate translation; but believing that to leave German untranslated is very unfair to those whose want of leisure or inclination has prevented their acquiring the language, I shall throughout translate every word cited. At the same time it is very unfair to the poet, and to the writer quoting the poet, to be forced to give translations which are after all felt not to represent the force and spirit of the original. I will do my best to give approximative translations, which the reader will be good enough to accept as such, rather than be left in the dark.

five years afterwards, by Frau Cornelia Schellhorn, a widow, blooming with six-and-thirty summers, and pos sessing the solid attractions of a good property; she kept the hotel Zum Weidenhof, where her new husband laid down the scissors, and donned the landlord's apron. He had two sons by her, and died in 1730, aged seventythree.

One of these two sons, the younger, Johann Caspar, was the father of our poet. Thus we see that Goethe, like Schiller, sprang from the people. He makes no mention of the lucky tailor, or of the Thuringian farrier in his autobiography. This silence may be variously interpreted. At first, I imagined it was aristocratic prudery on the part of von Goethe, minister and nobleman; but it is never well to put ungenerous constructions, when others, equally plausible and more honorable, are ready; and we shall do well here to follow the advice of a thoughtful and kindly writer, to employ our imagination in the service of charity.' We can easily imagine that Goethe was silent about the tailor, because, in truth, having never known him, there was none of that affectionate remembrance which encircles the objects of early life, to make this grandfather figure in the autobiography beside the grandfather Textor, who was known and loved. Probably, also, the tailor was seldom talked of in the parental circle.

Johann Caspar Goethe received a good education, travelled into Italy, became an imperial councillor in Frankfurt, and married, in 1748, Katharina Elizabeth, daughter of Johann Wolfgang Textor, the chief-magistrate (Schultheiss).

The genealogical tables of kings and conquerors are thought of interest, and why should not the genealogy of our poet be equally interesting to us? In the belief that it will be so, I here subjoin it.