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if we meant to assert that his humour is in all cases perfectly natural and pure; nay, that it is not often extravagant, untrue, or even absurd: but still, on the whole, the core and life of it are genuine, subtile, spiritual. Not without reason have his panegyrists named him Jeun Paul der Einzige," Jean Paul the Only:" in one sense or the other, either as praise or censure, his critics also must adopt this epithet; for surely, in the whole circle of literature, we look in vain for his parallel. Unite the sportfulness of Rabellais, and the best sensibility of Sterne, with the earnestness, and, even in slight portions, the sublimity of Milton; and and let the mosaic brain of old Burton give forth the workings of this strange union, with the pen of Jeremy Bentham!

in sincerity of heart, joyfully, and with undivided will. A harmonious development of being, the first and last object of all true culture, has therefore been attained; if not completely, at least more completely than in one of a thousand ordinary men. Nor let us forget, that in such a nature, it was not of easy attainment; that where much was to be developed, some imperfection should be forgiven. It is true, the beaten paths of literature lead the safeliest to the goal; and the talent pleases us most, which submits to shine with new gracefulness through old forms. Nor is the noblest and most pecuiar mind too noble or peculiar for working by prescribed laws: Sophocles, Shakspeare, Cer vantes, and in Richter's own age, Goethe, how little did they innovate on the given forms of To say how, with so peculiar a natural en- composition, how much in the spirit they owment, Richter should have shaped his breathed into them! All this is true; and ind by culture, is much harder than to say Richter must lose of our esteem in proportion. at he has shaped it wrong. Of affectation Much, however, will remain; and why should .e will neither altogether clear him, nor very we quarrel with the high, because it is not the Judly pronounce him guilty. That his man-highest? Richter's worst faults are nearly al.er of writing is singular, nay, in fact, a wild lied to his best merits; being chiefly exuberomplicated Arabesque, no one can deny. Butance of good, irregular squandering of wealth, the true question is, how nearly does this a dazzling with excess of true light. These manner of writing represent his real manner things may be pardoned the more readily, as of thinking and existing? With what degree they are little likely to be imitated. of freedom does it allow this particular form On the whole, Genius has privileges of its of being to manifest itself; or what fetters and own; it selects an orbit for itself; and be this perversions does it lay on such manifestation? never so eccentric, if it is indeed a celestial For the great law of culture is: Let each be-orbit, we mere star-gazers must at last comcome all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions; and show himself at length in his own shape and stature, be these what they may. There is no uniform of excelence, either in physical or spiritual nature: all genuine things are what they ought to be. The reindeer is good and beautiful, so likewise is the elephant. In literature it is the same: every man," says Lessing, "has his own style, like his own nose." True, there are noses of wonderful dimensions; but no nose can justly be amputated by the public,not even the nose of Slawkenbergius himself: so it be a real nose, and no wooden one, put on for deception's sake and mere show.

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To speak in grave language, Lessing means, and we agree with him, that the outward style is to be judged of by the inward qualities of the spirit which it is employed to body forth; that, without prejudice to critical propriety, well understood, the former may vary into many shapes as the latter varies; that, in short, the grand point for a writer is not to be of this or that external make and fashion, but, in every fashion, to be genuine, vigorous, alive, -alive with his whole being, consciously, and for beneficent results.

Tried by this test, we imagine Richter's wild manner will be found less imperfect than many a very tame one. To the man it may not be unsuitable. In that singular form, there is a fire, a splendour, a benign energy, which persuades us into tolerance, nay into love, of much that might otherwise offend. Above all, this man, alloyed with imperfections as he may be, is consistent and coherent: he is at one with himself; he knows his aims, and pursues them

pose ourselves; must cease to cavil at it, and begin to observe it, and calculate its laws. That Richter is a new planet in the intellectual heavens, we dare not affirm; an atmospheric meteor he is not wholly; perhaps a comet, that, though with long aberrations, and shrouded in a nebulous veil, has yet its place in the empyrean.

Of Richter's individual works, of his opinions, his general philosophy of life, we have no room left us to speak. Regarding his novels, we may say, that, except in some few instances, and those chiefly of the shorter class, they are not what, in strict language, we can term unities: with much callida junctura of parts, it is rare that any of them leaves on us the impression of a perfect, homogeneous, indivisible whole A true work of art requires to be fused in the mind of its creator, and as it were, poured forth (from his imagination, though not from his pen) at one simultaneous gush. Richter's works do not always bear sufficient marks of having been in fusion; yet neither are they merely riveted together: to say the least, they have been welded. A similar remark applies to many of his characters; indeed, more or less, to all of them, except such as are entirely humourous, or have a large dash of humour. In this latter province, certainly he is at home; a true poet, a maker: his Siebenkäs, his Schmelzle, even his Fibel and Fixlein are living figures. But in heroic personages, passionate, massive, overpowering as he is, we have scarcely ever a complete ideal; art has not attained to the concealment of itself. With his heroines again he is more successful; they are often true heroines, though perhaps with too little variety of character; bustling, buxom mothers and housewives, with all the caprices, perversities, B

and warm, generous helpfulness of women; | fearlessness, but also with the martyr reve or white, half-angelic creatures, meek, still, rence, of men that love Truth, and will not aclong-suffering, high-minded, of tenderest affec- cept a lie. A frank, fearless, honest, yet truly tions, and hearts crushed yet uncomplaining. spiritual faith is of all things the rarest in our Supernatural figures he has not attempted; time. and wisely, for he cannot write without belief. Of writings which, though with many reserYet many times he exhibits an imagination of vations, we have praised so much, our hesitat a singularity, nay, on the whole, of a truth and ing readers may demand some specimen. To grandeur, unexampled elsewhere. In his dreams unbelievers, unhappily, we have none of a there is a mystic complexity, a gloom, and amid convincing sort to give. Ask us not to reprethe dim, gigantic, half-ghastly shadows, gleam-sent the Peruvian forests by three twigs pluckings of a wizard splendour, which almost recalled from them; or the cataracts of the Nile by to us the visions of Ezekiel. By readers who a handful of its water! To those, meanwhile, have studied the Dream in the New-year's Eve we shall not be mistaken.

who will look on twigs as mere dissevered twigs, and a handful of water as only so many drops, we present the following. It is a summer Sunday night; Jean Paul is taking leave of the Hukelum Parson and his wife; like him we have long laughed at them or wept for them; like him, also, we are sad to part from them.

"We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he loves. I remained alone behind with the Night.

Richter's Philosophy, a matter of no ordinary interest, both as it agrees with the common philosophy of Germany, and disagrees with it, must not be touched on for the present. One only observation we shall make it is not mechanical, or skeptical; it springs not from the forum or the laboratory, but from the depths of the human spirit; and yields as its fairest product a noble system of morality, and the firmest conviction of religion. In this latter point we reckon him peculiarly worthy of "And I walked without aim through woods, study. To a careless reader he might seem through valleys, and over brooks, and through the wildest of infidels; for nothing can exceed sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night, like the freedom with which he bandies to and fro the a Day. I walked, and still looked, like the dogmas of religion, nay, sometimes, the highest magnet, to the region of midnight, to strengthobjects of Christian reverence. There are pas- en my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this sages of this sort, which will occur to every upstretching aurora of a morning beneath our reader of Richter; but which, not to fall into the feet. White night-butterflies flitted, white bloserror we have already blamed in Madame de soms fluttered, white stars fell, and the white Staël, we shall refrain from quoting. More light snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow is in the following: "Or," inquires he, in his of the Earth, which reaches beyond the Moon, usual abrupt way, (Note to Schmelzle's Journey,) and which is our Night. Then began the "Or are all your Mosques, Episcopal Churches, Æolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and tc Pagodas, Chapels of Ease, Tabernacles, and sound, blown on from above; and my immor Pantheons, any thing else but the Ethnic Fore- tal Soul was a string in this harp.-The heart court of the Invisible Temple and its Holy of of a brother, everlasting Man, swelled under Holies?" Yet, independently of all dogmas, the everlasting heaven, as the seas swell under nay, perhaps in spite of many, Richter is, in the sun and under the moon.-The distant the highest sense of the word, religious. A village clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it reverence, not a self-interested fear, but a noble were, with the ever-pealing tone of ancient reverence for the spirit of all goodness, forms Eternity.-The limbs of my buried ones the crown and glory of his culture. The fiery touched cold on my soul, and drove away its elements of his nature have been purified blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin. under holy influences, and chastened by a-I walked silently through little hamlets, and principle of mercy and humility into peace and well-doing. An intense and continual faith in man's immortality and native grandeur accompanies him; from amid the vortices of life he looks up to a heavenly loadstar; the solution of what is visible and transient, he finds in what is invisible and eternal. He has doubted, he denies, yet he believes. "When, in your last hour," says he, (Levana, p. 251,) "when, in your last hour, (think of this,) all "Towards morning, I described thy late faculty in the broken spirit shall fade away lights, little city of my dwelling, which I beand die into inanity,-imagination, thought, long to on this side the grave; I returned to effort, enjoyment, then at last will the night- the Earth; and in thy steeples, behind the byflower of Belief alone continue blooming, and advanced great midnight, it struck half-past refresh with its perfumes in the last darkness." two: about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down To reconcile these seeming contradictions, in the west, and the Moon rose in the east; and to explain the grounds, the manner, the con- my soul desired, in grief for the noble warlike gruity of Richter's belief, cannot be attempted blood which is still streaming on the blossoms here. We recommend him to the study, the of spring: Ah, retire, bloody War, like red tolerance, and even the praise, of all men who Mars: and thou, still Peace, come forth like have inquired into this highest of questions the mild divided Moon!'"-End of Quintus with a right spirit; inquired with the martyr | Fixlein.

close by their outer church-yards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had lain in them were mouldered into gray ashes. Cold thought! clutch not like a cold spectre at my heart: I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain stretches thither, and over, and below; and all is Life and Warmth, and Light, and all is Godlike or God...

Such, seen through no uncoloured medium, | immortality on writings; that charm which int in dim remoteness, and sketched in hurried, still, under every defacement, binds us to the transitory outline, are some features of Jean pages of our own Hookers, and Taylors, and Paul Friedrich Richter and his works. Ger- Brownes, when their way of thought has long many has long loved him; to England also ceased to be ours, and the most valued of their he must one day become known; for a man merely intellectual opinions have passed away, of this magnitude belongs not to one people, as ours too must do, with the circumstances but to the world. What our countrymen may and events in which they took their shape or decide of him, still more what may be his for- rise. To men of a right mind, there may tune with posterity, we will not try to foretell. long be in Richter much that has attraction Time has a contracting influence on many a and value. In the moral desert of vulgar Litewide-spread fame; yet of Richter we will say, rature, with its sandy wastes, and parched, that he may survive much. There is in him that bitter, and too often poisonous shrubs, the which does not die; that Beauty and Earnest- writings of this man will rise in their irregular ness of soul, that spirit of Humanity, of Love luxuriance, like a cluster of date-trees, with and mild Wisdom, over which the vicissitudes its greensward and well of water, to refresh of mode have no sway. This is that excellence the pilgrim, in the sultry solitude, with nouof the inmost nature which alone confers rishment and shade.

STATE OF GERMAN LITERATURE.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1827.]

THESE two books, notwithstanding their diversity of title, are properly parts of one and the same; the "Outlines," though of prior date in regard to publication, having now assumed the character of sequel and conclusion to the larger work,-of fourth volume to the other three. It is designed, of course, for the home market; yet the foreign student also will find in it a safe and valuable help, and, in spite of its imperfections, should receive it with thankfulness and good-will. Doubtless we might have wished for a keener discriminative and descriptive talent, and perhaps for a somewhat more catholic spirit, in the writer of such a history: but in their absence we have still much to praise. Horn's literary creed would, on the whole, we believe, be acknowledged by his countryman as the true one; and this, though it is chiefly from one immovable station that he can survey his subject, he seems heartily anxious to apply with candour and tolerance. Another improvement might have been a deeper principle of arrangement, a firmer grouping into periods and schools; for, as it stands, the work is more a critical sketch of German Poets, than a history of German Poetry.

*

is at home in this province; not only a speak-
er of the word, indeed, but a doer of the work;
having written, besides his great variety of
tracts and treatises, biographical, philosophi-
cal, and critical, several very deserving works
of a poetic sort. He is not, it must be owned,
a very strong man, but he is nimble and or-
derly, and goes through his work with a cer-
tain gayety of heart; nay, at times, with a
frolicsome alacrity which might even require
to be pardoned. His character seems full of
susceptibility; perhaps too much so for its
natural vigour. His novels, accordingly, to
judge from the few we have read of them,
verge towards the sentimental.
In the present
work, in like manner, he has adopted nearly
all the best ideas of his contemporaries, but
with something of an undue vehemence; and
he advocates the cause of religion, integrity,
and true poetic taste with great heartiness and
vivacity, were it not that too often his zeal
outruns his prudence and insight. Thus, for
instance, he declares repeatedly, in so many
words, that no mortal can be a poet unless he
is a Christian. The meaning here is very good;
but why this phraseology? Is it not inviting
the simple-minded (not to speak of scoffers,
whom Horn very justly contemns,) to ask,
when Homer subscribed the Thirty-nine Ar
ticles? or whether Sadi and Hafiz were really
of the Bishop of Peterborough's opinion!
Again, he talks too often of" representing the
Infinite in the Finite," of expressing the un
speakable, and such high matters. In fact,
Horn's style, though extremely readable, has
one great fault; it is, to speak it in a ingle

Let us not quarrel, however, with our author; his merits as a literary historian are plain, and by no means inconsiderable. Without rivalling the almost frightful laboriousness of Bouterwek or Eichhorn, he gives creditable proofs of research and general information, and possesses a lightness in composition, to which neither of these erudite persons can well pretend. Undoubtedly he has a flowing pen, and * 1. Die Poesie und Beredsamkeit der Deutschen, von Lu-word, an affected style. His stream of meanthers Zeit bis zur Gegenwart. Dargestellt von Franz Horn. (The Poetry and Oratory of the Germans, from Luther's Time to the Present. Exhibited by Franz Horn.) Berlin,

1822-1824. 3 vols. 8vo,

2. Umrisse zur Geschichte und Kritik der schönen

Literatur Deutschlands während der Jahre, 1790-1818. (Outlines for the History and Criticism of Polite Literaure in Germany, during the years 1790-1818.) By Franz Horn. Berlin, 1819, 8vo.

ing, uniformly clear and wholesome in itself, will not flow quietly along its channel; but is ever and anon spurting up into epigram and antithetic jets. Playful he is, and kindly, and we do believe, honest-hearted; but there is a certain snappishness in him, a frisking abrupt ness; and then his sport is more a perpetua

giggle, than any dignified smile, or even any sufficient laugh with gravity succeeding it. This sentence is among the best we recollect of him, and will partly illustrate what we mean. We submit it, for the sake of its import likewise, to all superfine speculators on the Reformation, in their future contrasts of Luther and Erasmus. "Erasmus," says Horn, "belongs to that species of writers who have all the desire in the world to build God Almighty a magnificent church,-at the same time, however, not giving the Devil any offence; to whom, accordingly, they set up a neat little chapel close by, where you can offer him some touch of sacrifice at a time, and practise a quiet household devotion for him without disturbance." In this style of "witty and conceited mirth," considerable part of the book is written. But our chief business at present is not with Franz Horn, or his book; of whom accordingly, recommending his labours to all inquisitive students of German, and himself to good estimation with all good men, we must here take leave. We have a word or two to say on that strange literature itself; concerning which our readers probably feel more curious to learn what it is, than with what skill it has been judged of.

of wit, in regard to this and so many other subjects! For surely the pleasure of despising, at all times and in itself a dangerous luxury, is much safer after the toil of examining than before it.

We differ from the Père Bouhours in this matter, and must endeavour to discuss it differently. There is, in fact, much in the present aspect of German Literature, not only deserving notice but deep consideration from all thinking men, and far too complex for being handled in the way of epigram. It is always advantageous to think justly of our neighbours; nay, in mere common honesty, it is a duty; and, like every other duty, brings its own reward. Perhaps at the present era this duty is more essential than ever; an era of such promise and such threatening, when so many elements of good and evil are everywhere in conflict, and human society is, as it were, struggling to body itself forth anew, and so many coloured rays are springing up in this quarter and in that, which only by their union can produce pure light. Happily, too, though still a difficult, it is no longer an impossible duty; for the commerce in material things has paved roads for commerce in things spiritual, and a true thought, or a noble creation, passes lightly to us from the remotest Above a entury ago, the Père Bouhours countries, provided only our minds be open to propounded to himself the pregnant question: receive it. This, indeed, is a rigorous proviso, Si un Allemand peut avoir de l'esprit? Had the and a great obstacle lies in it; one which to Père Bouhours bethought him of what country many must be insurmountable, yet which it Kepler and Leibnitz were, or who it was that is the chief glory of social culture to surmount. gave to mankind the three great elements For if a man who mistakes his own contractof modern civilization, Gunpowder, Printing, ed individuality for the type of human nature, and the Protestant Religion, it might have and deals with whatever contradicts him, as if thrown light on his inquiry. Had he known it contradicted this, is but a pedant, and withthe Nibelungen Lied; and where Reinecke Fuchs, out true wisdom, be he furnished with partial and Faust, and the Ship of Fools, and four-fifths equipments as he may,-what better shall we of all the popular mythology, humour, and think of a nation that, in like manner, isolates romance, to be found in Europe in the six-itself from foreign influence, regards its own teenth and seventeenth centuries, took its modes as so many laws of nature, and rejects rise; had he read a page or two of Ulrich all that is different as unworthy even of exHutten, Opitz, Paul Flemming, Logau, or even amination? Lohenstein and Hoffmanns-waldau, all of whom had already lived and written in his day; had the Père Bouhours taken this trouble, who knows but he might have found, with whatever amazement, that a German could actually have a little esprit, or perhaps even something better? No such trouble was requisite for the Père Bouhours. Motion in vacuo is well known to be speedier and surer than through a resisting medium, especially to imponderous bodies; and so the light Jesuit, unimpeded by facts or principles of any kind, failed not to reach his conclusion; and, in a comfortable frame of mind, to decide negatively, that a German could not have any literary talent.

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Thus did the Père Bouhours evince that he had "a pleasant wit" but in the end he has paid dear for it. The French, themselves, have long since begun to know something of the Germans, and something also of their own critical Daniel; and now it is by this one untimely joke that the hapless Jesuit is doomed to live; for the blessing of full oblivion is denied him, and so he hangs suspended in his own noose, over the dusky pool which he struggles toward, but for a great while will not reach. Might his fate but serve as a warning to kindred men

Of this narrow and perverted condition, the French, down almost to our own times, have afforded a remarkable and instructive example; as indeed of late they have been often enough upbraidingly reminded, and are now themselves, in a manlier spirit, beginning to admit. That our countrymen have at any time erred much in this point, cannot, we think, truly be alleged against them. Neither shall we say, with some passionate admirers of Germany, that to the Germans in particular they have been unjust. It is true, the literature and character of that country, which, within the last half century, have been more worthy perhaps than any other of our study and regard, are still very generally unknown to us, or, what is worse, misknown: but for this there are not wanting less offensive reasons. That the false and tawdry ware, which was in all hands, should reach us before the chaste and truly excellent, which it required some excellence to recognise; that Kotzebue's insanity should have spread faster, by some fifty years, than Lessing's wisdom; that Kant's Philosophy should stand in the back-ground as a dreary and abortive dream, and Gall's Craniclogy b held out to us from every booth as a reality;

all this lay in the nature of the case. That country has awaked in its old strength, our atmany readers should draw conclusions from tention to it has certainly awakened also; and imperfect premises, and by the imports judge if we yet know little or nothing of the Gertoo hastily of the stock imported from, was like-mans, it is not because we wilfully do them wise natural. No unfair bias, no unwise in- wrong, but, in good part, because they are disposition, that we are aware of, has ever been somewhat difficult to know. at work in the matter; perhaps, at worst, a degree of indolence, a blamable incuriosity to all products of foreign genius: for what more do we know of recent Spanish or Italian literature than of German; of Grossi and Manzoni, of Campomanes or Jovellanos, than of Tieck and Richter? Wherever German art, in those forms of it which need no interpreter, has addressed us immediately, our recognition of it has been prompt and hearty; from Dürer to Mengs, from Händel to Weber and Beethoven, we have welcomed the painters and musicians of Germany, not only to our praise, but to our affections and beneficence. Nor, if in their literature we have been more backward, is the literature itself without blame. Two centuries ago, translations from the German were comparatively frequent in England: Luther's Table-Talk is still a venerable classic in our language; nay Jacob Boehme has found a place among us, and this not as a dead letter, but as a living apostle to a still living sect of our religionists. In the next century, indeed, translation ceased; but then it was, in a great measure, because there was little worth translating. The horrors of the Thirty Years' War, followed by the conquests and conflagrations of Louis the Fourteenth, had desolated the country; French influence, extending from the courts of princes to the closets of the learned, lay like a baleful incubus over the far nobler mind of Germany; and all true nationality vanished from its literature, or was heard only in faint tones, which lived in the hearts of the people, but could not reach with any effect to the ears of foreigners.* And now that the genius of the

In fact prepossessions of all sorts naturally enough find their place here. A country which has no national literature, or literature too insignificant to force its way abroad, must always be, to its neighbours, at least in every important spiritual respect, an unknown and misestimated country. Its towns may figure on our maps; its revenues, population, manufactures, political connections, may be recorded in statistical books; but the character of the people has no symbol and no voice; we cannot know them by speech and discourse, but only mere sight and outward observation of their manners and procedure. Now, if both sight and speech, if both travellers and native literature, are found but ineffectual in this respect, how incalculably more so the former alone! To seize a character, even that of one man, in its life and secret mechanism, requires a philospher; to delineate it with truth and impressiveness, is a work for a poet. How then shall one or two sleek clerical tutors, with here and there a tedium-stricken esquire, or speculative halfpay captain, give us views on such a subject? How shall a man, to whom all characters of individual men are like sealed books, of which he sees only the title and the covers, decipher from his four-wheeled vehicle, and depict to us, the character of a nation? He courageously depicts his own optical delusions; notes this to be incomprehensible, that other to be insignificant; much to be good, much to be bad, and most of all indifferent; and so, with a few flowing strokes, completes a picture which, though it may not even resemble any possible object, his countrymen are to take for a national portrait. Nor is the fraud so readily detected for the character of a people has *Not that the Germans were idle; or altogether engaged, as we too loosely suppose, in the work of com- such complexity of aspect, that even the honest mentary and lexicography. On the contrary, they observer knows not always, not perhaps after rhymed and romanced with due vigour as to quantity; only the quality was bad. Two facts on this head may long inspection, what to determine regarding deserve mention: In the year 1749, there were found, in it. From his, only accidental, point of view, the library of one virtuoso, no fewer than 300 volumes the figure stands before him like the tracings of devotional poetry, containing, says Horn, "a treasure of 33,712 German hymns;" and, niuch about the same on veined marble,-a mass of mere random period, one of Gottsched's scholars had amassed as many lines, and tints, and entangled strokes, out of as 1500 German novels, all of the 17th century. which a lively fancy may shape almost any hymns we understand to be much better than the novels, or rather, perhaps, the novels to be much worse than the image. But the image he brings along with hymns. Neither was critical study neglected, nor in him is always the readiest; this is tried, it deed honest endeavour on all hands to attain improveanswers as well as another; and a second ment: witness the strange books from time to time put forth, and the still stranger institutions established for voucher now testifies its correctness. Thus this purpose. Among the former we have the "Poeti-each, in confident tones, though it may be with cal Funnel," (Poetische Trichter,) manufactured at Nürnberg in 1650, and professing, within six hours, to pour in the whole essence of this difficult art into the most unfurnished head. Nürnberg also was the chief seat of the famous Meistersänger and their Sängerzünfte, or Singerguilds, in which poetry was taught and practised like any other handicraft, and this by sober and well-meaning men, chiefly artisans, who could not understand why labour, which manufactured so many things, should not also manufacture another. Of these tuneful guildbrethren, Hans Sachs, by trade a shoemaker, is greatly the most noted and most notable. His father was a tailor; he himself learned the mystery of song under one Nunnebeck, a weaver. He was an adherent of his great contemporary Luther, who has even deigned to acknowledge his services in the cause of Reformation: how diligent a labourer Sachs must have been, will appear from the fact, that, in his 74th year, (1568,) on examining his stock for publication, he found that he had writ

The

a secret misgiving, repeats his precursor; the hundred times repeated comes in the end to be

ten 6048 poetical pieces, among which were 208 tragedies and comedies; and this, besides having all along kept house, like an honest Nürnberg burgher, by assiduous and sufficient shoemaking! Hans is not without genius, and a shrewd irony; and above all, the most gay, childlike, yet devout and solid character. A man neither to be despised nor patronized, but left standing on his own basis, as a singular product, and a still legible symbol, and clear mirror, of the time and country where he lived His best piece known to us, and many are well worth perusing, is the Fastnachtsspiel (Shrovetide Farce) of the Narrenschneiden, where the Doctor cures a bloated and lethargic patient by cutting out half a dozen Fools from his interior!

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