editor, and a writer both of poetry and prose. In 1812, appeared his early Volksmährchen, retouched and improved, and combined into a whole, by conversations, critical, disquisitionary and descriptive, in two volumes, entitled Phantasus; from which our present specimens of him are taken. His Altdeutsches Theater was followed by an Altenglisches, including the disputed plays of Shakspeare; a work gladly received by his countrymen, no less devoted admirers of Shakspeare than ourselves. Since that time, he has paid us a personal visit. In 1818, he was in London, and is said to have been well satisfied with his reception; which we cannot but hope was as respectful and kind as a guest so accomplished, and so friendly to England, deserved at our hands. The fruit of his residence among us, it seems, has already appeared in his writings. He has very lately given to the world a Novel on Shakspeare and his Times; in which he has not trembled to introduce, as acting characters, the great dramatist himself, with Marlowe, and various other poets of that age. Such is the report; which adds, that his work is admired in Germany; but that any copy of it has crossed the Channel, I have not heard. Of Tieck's present residence, or special pursuits, or economical circumstances, I am sorry to confess my entire ignorance. One little fact may perhaps be worth adding; that Sophie Bernhardi, an esteemed authoress, is his sister.

A very slight power of observation will suffice to convince us that Tieck is no ordinary man; but a true Poet, a Poet born as well as made. Of a nature at once susceptible and strong, he has looked over the circle of human interests with a far-sighted and piercing eye, and partaken deeply of its joy and woe; and these impressions on his heart or his mind have been like seed sown on fertile ground, ripening under the skyey influences into rich and varied luxuriance. He is no mere observer and compiler; rendering back to us, with additions or subtractions, the Beauty which existing things have of themselves presented to him; but a true Maker, to whom the actual and external is but the excitement for ideal creations, representing and ennobling its effects. His feeling or knowledge, his love or scorn, his gay humour or solemn earnestness, all the riches of his inward world, are pervaded and mastered by the living energy of the soul which possesses them ; and their finer essence is wafted to us in his poetry, like Arabian odours on the wings of the wind.

But this may be said of all true poets; and each is distinguished from all by his individual characteristics. Among Tieck's, one of the most remarkable is his combination of so many gifts in such full and simple harmony. His ridicule does not obstruct his adoration; his gay Southern fancy lives in union with a Northern heart. With the moods of a longing and impassioned spirit he seems deeply conversant; and a still imagination, in the highest sense of that word, reigns over all his poetic world. Perhaps, on the whole, this is his distinguishing faculty; an imagination, not of the intellect, but of the 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 quickly-fading.

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 withVOL. VI. (Misc. vol. 1.)

out 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.7 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 crack brained dreamer, with his spelling-book prose and doggrel verse, and dismiss him good-naturedly as a German Lake-poet. 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

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

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 model 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.

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, and 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

8 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.

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