THERE is something attractive and interesting, not only to the critic but to the general public, in that close contact and juxtaposition of two great writers in almost any department of literature, which permits every reader the privilege of contrast and comparison, and seems to enlarge his powers of discrimination by the mere external circumstances which call them forth. It would be difficult to overestimate how much Goethe has done for Schiller and Schiller for Goethe in this way. They have made a landscape and atmosphere for each other, rounding out, by the constant variety and contrast, each other's figures from the blank of the historical background-impressing upon our minds what one was and the other was not, by an evidence much more striking than that of critical estimate. We have not in England any parallel to the group they make, or to the effect they produce. Wordsworth and Coleridge might have faintly emulated it had their intercourse NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVIII., No. 5

Old Series Com plete in 63 vols.

been longer and fuller; but Wordsworth and Coleridge, or Byron and Shelley, or any other combination in our crowded poetical firmament, would be but two among many-not The Two, the crowned and undisputed monarchs of a national literature, as are this German pair,-men of the same age, the same inspiration, to whom the great task has been given, consciously and evidently, of shaping the poetry of a people. To us, with our older traditions and long accumulated slowlygrowing wealth, the position altogether is remarkable enough to call forth an interest more curious and eager than is generally excited by literary questions. The poetry of a nation, according to our experience, is its oldest and most assured inheritance, something so deeply bedded in our heart and life that we cannot point out to ourselves where it began, or call up before our minds any conception of those dim ages when it was not. Shakespeare himself, the greatest glory of our English

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