changes his object and occupation from page | rating (decidedly in bombast) over the grave. to page, often from sentence to sentence, in the Then, it seems, there were meetings held in most unaccountable way; a pleasure journey, various parts of Germany, to solemnize the and a sickness of fifteen years, are despatched memory of Richter; among the rest, one in the with equal brevity; in a moment you find him Museum of Frankfort on the Maine; where a married, and the father of three fine children. Doctor Börne speaks another long speech, if He dies no less suddenly;-he is studying as possible in still more decided bombast. Next usual, writing poetry, receiving visits, full of come threnodies from all the four winds, mostly life and business, when instantly some para- on very splay-footed metre. Thewhole of which graph opens under him, like one of the trap- is here snatched from the kind oblivion of the doors in the Vision of Mirza, and he drops, newspapers, and "lives in Settle's numbers one without note of preparation, into the shades day more." below. Perhaps, indeed, not for ever: we have instances of his rising after the funeral, and winding up his affairs. The time has been, that when the brains were out the man would die; but Doering orders these matters dif-hibit in the epicedial style. They rather tesferently.

We have too much reverence for the name of Richter to think of laughing over these unhappy threnodies and panegyrists; some of whom far exceed any thing we English can ex

tify, however maladroitly, that the Germans We beg leave to say, however, that we really have felt their loss,-which, indeed, is one to have no private pique against Doering: on the Europe at large; they even affect us with a contrary, we are regular purchasers of his certain melancholy feeling, when we consider ware; and it gives us true pleasure to see his how a heavenly voice must become mute, and spirits so much improved since we first met nothing be heard in its stead but the whoop of him. In the Life of Schiller, his state did seem quite earthly voices, lamenting, or pretending rather unprosperous: he wore a timorous, sub-to lament. Far from us be all remembrance missive, and downcast aspect, as if like Sterne's of Doering and Company, while we speak of Ass, he were saying, "Don't thrash me ;-but | Richter! But his own works give us some if you will, you may!" Now, however, com- glimpses into his singular and noble nature; forted by considerable sale, and praise from and to our readers a few words on this man, this and the other Literaturblatt, which has certainly one of the most remarkable of his commended his diligence, his fidelity, and, age, will not seem thrown away. strange to say, his method, he advances with erect countenance and firm hoof, and even re-ter is little known out of Germany. The only calcitrates contemptuously against such as do him offence. Glück auf dem Weg! is the worst we wish him.

Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richthing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country, is his saying, imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed Of his Life of Richter, these preliminary ob- by most newspaper critics: Providence has servations may be our excuse for saying but given to the French the empire of the land, to little. He brags much, in his preface, that it the English that of the sea, to the Germans that is all true and genuine; for Richter's widow, of-the air!" Of this last element, indeed, his it seems, had, by public advertisement, cau- | own genius might easily seem to have been a tioned the world against it; another biography, denizen: so fantastic, many-coloured, far-grasppartly by the illustrious deceased himself, part-ing, every way perplexed and extraordinary in ly by Otto, his oldest friend and the appointed his mode of writing, that to translate him is next editor of his works, being actually in prepara- to impossible; nay, a dictionary of his works tion. This rouses the indignant spirit of Doer- has actually been in part published for the use ing, and he stoutly asseverates, that, his docu- of German readers! These things have rements being altogether authentic, this biogra-stricted his sphere of action, and may long rephy is no pseudo-biography. With greater truth strict it to his own country: but there, in rehe might have asseverated that it was no bio- turn, he is a favourite of the first class; studied graphy at all. Well are he and Hennings of through all his intricacies with trustful admiGotha aware that this thing of shreds and ration, and a love which tolerates much. Durpatches has been vamped together for sale ing the last forty years, he has been continually only. Except a few letters to Kunz, the Bam- before the public, in various capacities, and berg bookseller, which turn mainly on the pur-growing generally in esteem with all ranks of chase of spectacles, and the journeyings and freightage of two boxes that used to pass and repass between Richter and Kunz's circulating library; with three or four notes of similar im-vindicated his singularities to nearly universal portance, and chiefly to other booksellers, there are no biographical documents here, which were not open to all Europe as well as to Heinrich Doering. Indeed, very nearly one-half of the Life is occupied with a description of the funeral and its appendages,-how the "sixty torches, with a number of lanterns and pitch- The biography of so distinguished a person pans," were arranged; how this patrician or pro- could scarcely fail to be interesting, especialfessor followed that, through Friedrich-street, ly his autobiography; which, accordingly, we Chancery-street, and other streets of Bayreuth; and how at last the torches all went out, as Doctor Gabler and Doctor Spatzier were pero

critics; till, at length, his gain sayers have been either silenced or convinced; and Jean Paul, at first reckoned half-mad, has long ago

satisfaction, and now combines popularity with real depth of endowment, in perhaps a greater degree than any other writer; being second in the latter point to scarcely more than one of his contemporaries, and in the former second to none.

wait for, and may in time submit to our readers, if it seem worthy: meanwhile, the history of his life, so far as outward events characterize

"Richter's studying or sitting apartment offered, about this time, (1793,) a true and beautiful emblem of his simple and noble way of thought, which comprehended at once the high and the low. Whilst his mother, who then lived with him, busily pursued her household work, occupying herself about stove and dresser, Jean Paul was sitting in a corner of the same room, at a simple writing-desk, with few or no books about him, but merely with one or two drawers containing excerpts and manuscripts. The jingle of the household operations seemed not at all to disturb him, any more than did the cooing of the pigeons, which fluttered to and fro in the chamber,-a place, indeed, of considerable size."-P. 8.

it, may be stated in few words. He was born | the streets of Bayreuth, we have heard, he was at Wunsiedel in Bayreuth, in March, 1763. seldom seen without a flower in his breast. A His father was a subaltern teacher in the Gym- man of quiet tastes, and warm, compassionate nasium of the place, and was afterwards pro- affections! His friends he must have loved moted to be clergyman at Schwarzbach on the as few do. Of his poor and humble mother Saale. Richter's early education was of the he often speaks by allusion, and never without scantiest sort; but his fine faculties and un- reverence and overflowing tenderness. "Unwearied diligence supplied every defect. Un- happy is the man," says he, " for whom his own able to purchase books, he borrowed what he mother has not made all other mothers venercould come at, and transcribed from them, often able !" and elsewhere:-"O thou who hast great part of their contents,-a habit of ex- still a father and a mother, thank God for it in cerpting, which continued with him through the day when thy soul is full of joyful tears, life, and influenced, in more than one way, his and needs a bosom wherein to shed them!". mode of writing and study. To the last, he We quote the following sentences from Doerwas an insatiable and universal reader; so ing, almost the only memorable thing he has that his extracts accumulated on his hands, written in this volume:"till they filled whole chests." In 1780, he went to the University of Leipzig; with the highest character, in spite of the impediments which he had struggled with, for talent and acquirement. Like his father, he was destined for Theology; from which, however, his vagrant genius soon diverged into Poetry and Philosophy, to the neglect, and, ere long, to the final abandonment, of his appointed profession. Not well knowing what to do, he now accepted a tutorship in some family of rank; then he had pupils in his own house,-which, however, like his way of life, he often changed; for by this time he had become an author, and, in his wanderings over Germany, was putting forth,- -now here, now there, the strangest books, with the strangest titles: For instance,Greenland Lawsuits;-Biographical Recreations under the Cranium of a Giantess;-Selection from the Papers of the Devil;-and the like. In these indescribable performances, the splendid faculties of the writer, luxuriating as they seemed in utter riot, could not be disputed; nor, with all its extravagance, the fundamental strength, honesty, and tenderness of his nature. Genius will reconcile men to much. By degrees, Jean Paul began to be considered not a strange, crackbrained mixture of enthusiast and buffoon, but a man of infinite humour, sensibility, force, and penetration. His writings procured him friends and fame; and at length a wife and a settled provision. With Caroline Mayer, his good spouse, and a pension (in 1802) from the King of Bavaria, he settled in Bayreuth, the capital of his native province; where he lived thenceforth, diligent and celebrated in many new departments of literature; and died on the 14th of November, 1825, loved as well as admired by all his countrymen, and most by those who had known him most intimately.

Our venerable Hooker, we remember, also enjoyed "the jingle of household operations," and the more questionable jingle of shrewd tongues to boot, while he wrote; but the good thrifty mother, and the cooing pigeons, were wanting. Richter came afterwards to live in finer mansions, and had the great and learned for associates; but the gentle feelings of those days abode with him: through life he was the same substantial, determinate, yet meek and tolerating man. It is seldom that so much rugged energy can be so blandly attempered; -that so much vehemence and so much softness will go together.

The expected edition of Richter's works is to be in sixty volumes: and they are no less multifarious than extensive; embracing subjects of all sorts, from the highest problems of transcendental philosophy, and the most passionate poetical delineations, to Golden Rules for the Weather-Prophet, and instructions in the Art of Falling Asleep. His chief productions are novels: the Unsichtbare Loge (Invisible Lodge); Flegeljahre (Wild-Oats); Life of Fixlein; the Jubelsenior (Parson in Jubilee); Schmelzle's Journey to Flütz; Katzenberger's Journey to the Bath; Life of Fibel; with many lighter pieces; and two works of a higher

A huge, irregular man, both in mind and person, (for his portrait is quite a physiognomical study,) full of fire, strength, and impetuosity, Richter seems, at the same time, to have been, in the highest degree, mild, simple-order, Hesperus and Titan, the largest and the hearted, humane. He was fond of conversation, and might well shine in it: he talked, as he wrote, in a style of his own, full of wild strength and charins, to which his natural Bayreuth accent often gave additional effect. Yet he loved retirement, the country, and all natural things; from his youth upwards, he himself tells us, he may almost be said to have lived in the open air; it was among groves and meadows that he studied,-often that he wrote. Even in

best of his novels. It was the former that first (in 1795) introduced him into decisive and universal estimation with his countrymen: the latter he himself, with the most judicious of his critics, regarded as his master-piece. But the name Novelist, as we in England must understand it, would ill describe so vast and discursive a genius: for, with all his grotesque, tumultuous pleasantry, Richter is a man of a truly earnest, nay, high and solemn character

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every one of his writings. He died while engaged, under recent and almost total blindness, in enlarging and remodelling this Campaner Thal: the unfinished manuscript was borne upon his coffin to the burial vault; and Klopstock's hymn, Auferstehen wirst du, "Thou shalt arise, my soul," can seldom have been sung with more appropriate application than over the grave of Jean Paul.

and seldom writes without a meaning far be- | glimpses of which look forth on us from almost yond the sphere of common romancers. Hesperus and Titan themselves, though in form nothing more than "novels of real life," as the Minerva Press would say, have solid metal enqugh in them to furnish whole circulating libaries, were it beaten into the usual filigree; and much which, attenuate it as we might, no quarterly subscriber could well carry with him. Amusement is often, in part almost always, a mean with Richter; rarely or never his high- We defy the most careless or prejudiced est end. His thoughts, his feelings, the creations reader to peruse these works without an imof his spirit, walk before us imbodied under pression of something splendid, wonderful, and wondrous shapes, in motley and ever-fluctuat- daring. But they require to be studied as well ing groups; but his essential character, how-as read, and this with no ordinary patience, if ever he disguise it, is that of a Philosopher and the reader, especially the foreign reader, wishes moral Poet, whose study has been human to comprehend rightly either their truth or their nature, whose delight and best endeavour are want of truth. Tried by many an accepted with all that is beautiful, and tender, and mys-standard, Richter would be speedily enough teriously sublime, in the fate or history of man. disposed of; pronounced a mystic, a German This is the purport of his writings, whether dreamer, a rash and presumptuous innovator; their form be that of fiction or of truth; the spirit and so consigned, with equanimity, perhaps that pervades and ennobles his delineations of with a certain jubilee, to the Limbo appointed common life, his wild wayward dreams, allego- for all such wind-bags and deceptions. Oriries, and shadowy imaginings, no less than his ginality is a thing we constantly clamour for, disquisitions of a nature directly scientific. and constantly quarrel with; as if, observes our author himself, any originality but our own could be expected to content us! In fact, all strange things are apt, without fault of theirs, to estrange us at first view, and unhappily scarcely any thing is perfectly plain, but what is also perfectly common. The current coin of the realm passes into all hands; and be it gold, silver, copper, is acceptable and of known value: but with new ingots, with foreign bars, and medals of Corinthian brass, the case is widely different.

But in this latter province also, Richter has accomplished much. His Vorschule der Aesthetik (Introduction to Esthetics*) is a work on poetic art, based on principles of no ordinary depth and compass, abounding in noble views, and, notwithstanding its frolicsome exuberance, in sound and subtile criticism; esteemed even in Germany, where criticism has long been | treated of as a science, and by such persons as Winkelmann, Kant, Herder, and the Schlegels. Of this work we could speak long, did our limits allow. We fear it might astonish many an There are few writers with whom deliberahonest brother of our craft, were he to read it; tion and careful distrust of first impressions and altogether perplex and dash his maturest are more necessary than with Richter. He counsels, if he chanced to understand it.- is a phenomenon from the very surface; he Richter has also written on education, a work presents himself with a professed and deterentitled Levana; distinguished by keen prac-mined singularity: his language itself is a stone tical sagacity, as well as generous sentiment, of stumbling to the critic; to critics of the and a certain sober magnificence of speculation; grammarian species, an unpardonable, often the whole presented in that singular style which an insuperable, rock of offence. Not that he characterizes the man. Germany is rich in is ignorant of grammar, or disdains the sciences works on Education; richer at present than of spelling and parsing; but he exercises both any other country: it is there only that some in a certain latitudinarian spirit; deals with echo of the Lockes and Miltons, speaking of astonishing liberality in parentheses, dashes, this high matter, may still be heard; and speak- and subsidiary clauses; invents hundreds of ing of it in the language of our own time, with new words, alters old ones, or by hyphen, insight into the actual wants, advantages, chains, pairs, and packs them_together_into perils, and prospects of this age. Among most jarring combination; in short, produces writers on this subject, Richter holds a high sentences of the most heterogeneous, lumberplace; if we look chiefly at his tendency and ing, interminable kind. Figures without limit aims, perhaps the highest.-The Clavis Fichti- indeed the whole is one tissue of metaphors, ana is a ludicrous performance, known to us and similes, and allusions to all the provinces only by report; but Richter is said to possess of Earth, Sea, and Air, interlaced with epithe merit, while he laughs at Fichte, of under-grammatic breaks, vehement bursts, or sarstanding him; a merit among Fichte's critics, donic turns, interjections, quips, puns, and which seems to be one of the rarest. Report also, we regret to say, is all that we know of the Campaner Thal, a Discourse on the Immortality of the Soul; one of Richter's beloved topics, or rather the life of his whole philosophy, * From air úvoμaι, to feel. A word invented by Baumgarten, (some eighty years ago,) to express generally the Science of the Fine Arts; and now in universal use among the Germans. Perhaps we also might as well adopt it; at least if any such science should ever arise among us.

even oaths! A perfect Indian jungle it seems; a boundless, unparalleled imbroglio; nothing on all sides but darkness, dissonance, confusion worse confounded! Then the style of the whole corresponds, in perplexity and extravagance, with that of the parts. Every work, be it in fiction or serious treatise, is embaled in some fantastic wrappage, some mad narrative accounting for its appearance, and connecting it with the author, who generally becomes a per

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son of the drama himself, before all is over. | from its proper centre, his intellectual universe, He has a whole imaginary geography of Europe no longer a distorted, incoherent series of airin his novels; the cities of Flachsenfingen, landscapes, coalesces into compact expansion; Haarhaar, Scheerau, and so forth, with their a vast, magnificent, and variegated scene; full, princes, and privy-councillors, and serene indeed, of wondrous products, and rude, it highnesses; most of whom, odd enough fel- may be, and irregular; but gorgeous, and lows every way, are Richter's private acquaint-varied, and ample; gay with the richest verances, talk with him of state matters, (in the dure and foliage, and glittering in the brightest purest Tory dialect,) and often incite him to get and kindest sun. on with his writing. No story proceeds without the must erratic digressions, and voluminous tagrags rolling after it in many a snaky twine. Ever and anon there occurs some "Extra-leaf," with its satirical petition, programme, or other wonderful intercalation, no mortal can foresee on what. It is, indeed, a mighty maze; and often the panting reader toils after him in vain, or, baffled and spent, indignantly stops short, and retires perhaps for ever.

Richter has been called an intellectual Colossus; and in truth it is still somewhat in this light that we view him. His faculties are all of gigantic mould; cumbrous, awkward in their movements; large and splendid rather than harmonious or beautiful; yet joined in living union, and of force and compass altogether extraordinary. He has an intellect vehement, rugged, irresistible; crushing in pieces the hardest problems; piercing into the most hidAll this, we must admit, is true of Richter; den combinations of things, and grasping the but much more is true also. Let us not turn most distant: an imagination vague, sombre, from him after the first cursory glance, and splendid, or appalling; brooding over the imagine we have settled his account by the abysses of Being; wandering through Infiniwords Rhapsody and Affectation. They are tude, and summoning before us, in its dim recheap words we allow, and of sovereign po- ligious light, shapes of brilliancy, solemnity, tency; we should see, therefore, that they be or terror: a fancy of exuberance literally unnot rashly applied. Many things in Richter exampled; for it pours its treasures with a accord ill with such a theory. There are rays lavishness which knows no limit, hanging, like of the keenest truth, nay, steady pillars of the sun, a jewel on every grass-blade, and scientific light rising through this chaos: Is it sowing the earth at large with orient pearl. But in fact a chaos, or may it be that our eyes are deeper than all these lies Humour, the ruling not of infinite vision, and have only missed the quality with Richter; as it were the central fire plan? Few rhapsodists are men of science, that pervades and vivifies his whole being. He of solid learning, of rigorous study, and ac- is a humorist from his inmost soul; he thinks curate, extensive, nay, universal knowledge; as a humorist, he feels, imagines, acts as a as he is. With regard to affectation, also, there humorist: Sport is the element in which his is much to be said. The essence of affecta-nature lives and works. A tumultuous element tion is that it be assumed: the character is, as it were, forcibly crushed into some foreign mould, in the hope of being thereby reshaped and beautified; the unhappy man persuades himself that he is in truth a new and wonderfully engaging creature, and so he moves about with a conscious air, though every movement betrays not symmetry, but dislocation. This it is to be affected, to walk in a vain show. But the strangeness alone is no proof of the vanity. Many men that move smoothly in the old established railways of custom will be found to have their affectation; and perhaps here Yet the anarchy is not without its purpose; and there some divergent genius be accused these vizards are not mere hollow masks; but of it unjustly. The show, though common, may there are living faces beneath them, and this not cease to be vain; nor become so for being mumming has its significance. Richter is a man uncommon. Before we censure a man for of mirth, but he seldom or never condescends to seeming what he is not, we should be sure that be a merry-andrew. Nay, in spite of its extravawe know what he is. As to Richter in parti-gance, we should say that his humour is of all cular, we think it but fair to observe, that his gifts intrinsically the finest and most genustrange and tumultuous as he is, there is a ine. It has such witching turns; there is somecertain benign composure visible in his writings; a mercy, a gladness, a reverence, united in such harmony, as we cannot but think bespeaks not a false, but a genuine state of mind; not a feverish and morbid, but a healthy and robust state.

The secret of the matter, perhaps, is that Richter requires more study than most readers care to give; for, as we approach more closely, many things grow clearer. In the man's own sphere there is consistency; the farther we advance into it, we see confusion more and more unfold itself into order till at last, viewed

for such a nature, and wild work he makes in it! A Titan in his sport as in his earnestness, he oversteps all bound, and riots without law or measure. He heaps Pelion upon Ossa, and hurls the universe together and asunder like a case of playthings. The Moon "bombards” the Earth, being a rebellious satellite; Mars "preaches" to the other planets very singular doctrine; nay, we have Time and Space themselves playing fantastic tricks: it is an infinite masquerade; all Nature is gone forth mumming in the strangest guises.

thing in it so capricious, so quaint, so heartfelt. From his Cyclopean workshop, and its fuliginous limbecs, and huge unwieldy machinery, the little shrivelled, twisted figure comes forth at last, so perfect and so living, to be for ever laughed at and for ever loved! Wayward as he seems, he works not without forethought; like Rubens, by a single stroke, he can change a laughing face into a sad one. But in his smile itself, a touching pathos may lie hidden, a pity too deep for tears. He is a man of feeling, in the noblest sense of that word; for he loves all living with the heart of a brother; his

is a sort of inverse sublimity; exalting, as it were, into our affections what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what is above us. The former is scarcely less precious or heart-affecting than the latter; perhaps it is still rarer, and, as a test of genius, still more decisive. It is, in fact, the bloom and

seul rushes forth, in sympathy with gladness | but in still smiles, which lie far deeper. It and sorrow, with goodness or grandeur, over all creation. Every gentle and generous affection, every thrill of mercy, every glow of nobleness, awakens in his bosom a response, nay, strikes his spirit into harmony; a wild music as of wind-harps, floating round us in fitful swells, but soft sometimes, and pure and soul-entrancing as the song of angels! Aver-perfume, the purest effluence of a deep, fine, sion itself with him is not hatred; he despises much, but justly, with tolerance also, with placidity, and even a sort of love. Love, in fact, is the atmosphere he breathes in, the medium through which he looks. His is the spirit which gives life and beauty to whatever it embraces. Inanimate Nature itself is no longer an insensible assemblage of colours and perfumes, but a mysterious Presence, with which he communes in unutterable sympathies. We might call him, as he once called Herder," a Priest of Nature, a mild Bramin," wandering amid spicy groves, and under benignant skies. The infinite Night with her solemn aspects, Day, and the sweet approach of Even and Morn, are full of meaning for him. He loves the green Earth with her streams and forests, her flowery leas and eternal skies; loves her with a sort of passion, in all her vicissitudes of light and shade; his spirit revels in her grandeur and charms; expands like the breeze over wood and lawn, over glade and dingle, stealing and giving odours.

and loving nature; a nature in harmony with itself, reconciled to the world and its stintedness and contradiction, nay, finding in this very contradiction new elements of beauty as well as goodness. Among our own writers, Shakspeare in this as in all other provinces, must have his place: yet not the first; his humour is heartfelt, exuberant, warm, but seldom the tenderest or most subtile. Swift inclines more to simple irony; yet he had genuine humour too, and of no unloving sort, though cased, like Ben Jonson's, in a most bitter and caustic rind. Sterne follows next; our last specimen of humour, and, with all his faults, our best; our finest, if not our strongest, for Yorick, and Corporal Trim, and Uncle Toby, have yet no brother but in Don Quixote, far as he lies above them. Cervantes is indeed the purest of all humourists; so gentle and genial, so full yet so ethereal, is his humour, and in such accordance with itself and his whole noble nature. The Italian mind is said to abound in humour; yet their classics seem to give us no right emblem of it: except, perhaps, in Ariosto, there appears little in their current poetry that reaches the region of true humour. In France, since the days of Montaigne, it seems to be nearly extinct. Voltaire, much as he dealt in ridicule, never rises into humour; and even with Molière, it is far more an affair of the understanding than of the character.

It has sometimes been made a wonder that things so discordant should go together; that men of humour are often likewise men of sensibility. But the wonder should rather be to see them divided; to find true genial humour dwelling in a mind that was coarse or callous. The essence of humour is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence. Nay, we may say that unless seasoned and That in this point, Richter excels all German purified by humour, sensibility is apt to run authors, is saying much for him, and may be wild; will readily corrupt into disease, false- said truly. Lessing has humour,-of a sharp, hood, or, in one word, sentimentality. Wit-rigid, substantial, and on the whole, genial sort: ness Rousseau, Zimmermann, in some points also St. Pierre: to say nothing of living instances; or of the Kotzebues, and other pale hosts of wobegone mourners, whose wailings, like the howl of an Irish wake, from time to time cleft the general ear. The last perfection of our faculties, says Schiller with a truth far deeper than it seems, is that their activity, without ceasing to be sure and earnest, become sport. True humour is sensibility, in the most catholic and deepest sense; but it is this sport of sensibility; wholesome and perfect therefore; as it were, the playful teasing fondness of a mother to her child.

That faculty of irony, of caricature, which often passes by the name of humour, but consists chiefly in a certain superficial distortion or reversal of objects, and ends at best in laughter, bears no resemblance to the humour of Richter. A shallow endowment this; and often more a habit than an endowment. It is but a poor fraction of humour; or rather, it is the body to which the soul is wanting; any life it has being false, artificial, and irrational. | True humour springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter,

yet the ruling bias of his mind is to logic. So likewise has Wieland, though much diluted by the general loquacity of his nature, and impoverished still farther by the influences of a cold, meagre, French skepticism. Among the Ramlers, Gellerts, Hagedorns, of Frederick the Second's time, we find abundance, and delicate in kind too, of that light matter which the French call pleasantry; but little or nothing that deserves the name of humour. In the present age, however, there is Goethe, with a rich true vein; and this sublimated, as it were, to an essence, and blended in still union with his whole mind. Tieck also, among his many fine susceptibilities, is not without a warm keen sense for the ridiculous; and a humour rising, though by short fits, and from a much lower atmosphere, to be poetic. But of all these men, there is none that, in depth, copiousness, and intensity of humour, can be compared with Jean Paul. He alone exists in humour; lives, moves, and has his being in it. With him it is not so much united to his other qualities, of intellect, fancy, imagination, moral feeling, as these are united to it; or rather unite themselves to it, and grow under its warmth, as in their proper temperature and climate. Not as