harsher and coarser in his translations; the later, on account of the roughnesses filed into them, are almost unpronounceable; so that, if one was likely to trip on the smooth polished slippery mahogany floor of Schlegel's verses, one was no less likely to stumble over the clumsy marble blocks of old Voss. At length, out of rivalry, Voss determined on translating Shakspeare, which Schlegel, in his first period, had so excellently done into German; but this turned out very ill for old Voss, and still worse for his publisher; the production was a total failure. Where Schlegel possibly translated too effeminately, where his verses are not unfrequently like whipt cream, with regard to which one hardly knows, when carried to the mouth, whether it is to be eaten or drunk; in all these places, Voss is as hard as stone, and a man runs the risk of breaking a jaw-bone in pronouncing his lines.' It was Goethe, however, who gave the finishing blow to the romantic school; and exceedingly ungrateful of him it was, for they worshipped him as the first of moderns, and held him up as a model for posterity. They had him, too' (says Heine, with his wonted malice), 'so immediately at hand. From Jena to Weimar the road lay through an avenue of pretty trees-on which grow plums, very pleasant to the taste, when one is thirsty from the heat; and the Schlegels travelled this road very frequently; and at Weimar they had many a colloquy with Privy Counsellor Goethe, who was always a great diplomatist, and quietly listened to the Schlegels, smiled assentingly, often gave them a dinner, did them now and then a favour, and so forth.' They are also accused of making court to Schiller, who, if they did so, certainly rejected their advances, and applied to them, as appears from his correspondence, terms expressive of no very qualified contémpt. One of the principal causes of A. W. Schlegel's present unpopularity in Germany (which seems to have escaped Heine) is an attempt made by him to revenge himself on Goethe and Schiller by epigrams, not certainly in the best possible taste, though the provocation was great. The plums, which were so attractive to the Schlegels, appear to have made a strong impression on Heine himself, for they play a prominent part in his first interview with Goethe; the account of which, as well as the personal description preceding it, are are amusing enough :— The accordance of personal appearance with genius, such as is required in extraordinary men, was conspicuous in Goethe. One might study Grecian art in him, as in an antique. His eyes were tranquil as those of a god. Time had been powerful enough to cover *This may remind the reader of Johnson's celebrated parallel between Dryden and Pope. his his head with snow, but not to bend it; he carried it ever proud and high and when he spoke, he seemed to grow bigger; and when he stretched out his hand, it was as if he could prescribe, with his finger, to the stars in heaven the way they were to go. When I visited him in Weimar, and stood face to face with him, I looked involuntarily around in search of the eagle with the thunderbolts in his beak. I was on the very point of addressing him in Greek; but, so soon as I observed that he understood German, I related to him, in my own mother tongue, that the plums upon the road between Jena and Weimar tasted very nice. So many long winter nights had I thought it over-how many deep and sublime things I would say to Goethe when I saw him: and when, at length, I did see him, I said to him— that Saxon plums tasted very nice! And Goethe smiled-he smiled with the same lips with which he had once kissed the fair Leda, Europa, Danaë, Semele, and so many other princesses and ordinary nymphs besides.' All this is thoroughly German-but no one who ever saw Goethe can deny that he was in reality a most sublime specimen of the human race. Were we to linger over all the piquant passages in this book, we might be lured on to extract at least a third of it; but we have only room for one extract more, and after duly deliberating, we have resolved on giving the preference to the following observations on the relative merits of Goethe and Schiller, the two great candidates for the literary throne of Germany; where a republic of letters (for the present confusion of ranks and absence of rulers rather resembles an anarchy) has been hitherto unknown. Like a steady, prudent, thinking people as they are, they have always insisted on a king, and have never shown themselves very anxious to impose limitations on his authority.* Our readers will not fail to compare the passage we are about to extract with a paragraph on Goethe and Schiller from Mr. Coleridge's TableTalk,' which we have printed in a preceding article. We cannot but suspect that Coleridge, in assigning a higher rank to Schiller than to Goethe, was unconsciously influenced by the recollections. of his own early intercourse with the former, and more especially of his splendid exertions in the English Wallenstein.' Heine says Although at one time I was myself an adversary of Goethe, I did *Tieck (said Goethe) was emperor, too, for a time; but it did not last long, he was soon deposed. They said there was something too Tituslike in his temper: he was too mild and good-natured. In the present state of things the empire requires a rigorous sway, and what may be called a sort of barbaric grandeur. Next came the reign of the Schlegels. Things now went on better. August Wilhelm Schlegel, the first, and Frederick, the second of the name, both ruled with becoming severity; not a day passed in which some one was not sent into exile, or in which a few executions did not take place. Perfectly right! Such rulers have, from time immemorial, been immense favourites with the people.'-Characteristics of Goethe, by Mrs. Austin. not not approve the coarseness with which Menzel criticised him, and İ lamented this want of feeling. I observed-Goethe is at all events the king of our literature; when we apply the critical knife to such a one, we must never permit the least diminution of the courtesy due to his rank; like that executioner who had to behead Charles I., and before he discharged his duty, kneeled down before the king, and prayed his most gracious pardon. Entre nous, Goethe's enemies formed a very mixed assemblage. What came before the world I have sufficiently indicated; it is more difficult to guess the particular motive of each in publishing his anti-Goethean convictions. There is only one person whose precise motive I know; and as I myself am that person, I will honestly confess it was-envy. To my praise be it spoken, however, that in Goethe I never attacked the poet, but only the man. I have never censured his works; I have never been able to discover faults in them, like those critics who, with their finely-ground glasses, have observed specks even in the moon. The sharp-sighted folks! what they regard as specks are blooming groves, silver streams, lofty mountains, laughing vales. Nothing is sillier than the depreciation of Goethe in favour of Schiller, by whom they never meant honestly, and who has always been exalted for the mere purpose of degrading Goethe. Or were people really ignorant that those high-renowned, high-ideal forms, those altar-pieces of youth and morality, which Schiller set up, were far easier to produce than those sinful, polluted creatures of the little world, of which Goethe gives us glances in his works? Can they, then, be ignorant that mediocre painters for the most part paint the figures of saints as large as life, but that many a great master makes it his study to paint, with natural truth and artist-like propriety, possibly a Spanish beggar-boy lousing himself, a lowcountry boor vomiting or having a tooth drawn, and ugly old women, as we see in small Dutch cabinet-pictures? The great and fearful is much more easily represented in art than the little and complete. . . . Rail as you will against the vulgarities in Faust, against the scenes on the Brocken, in Auerbach's Cellar!-rail against the irregularities in Wilhelm Meister!-all that, however, is precisely what you cannot imitate. But you are not desirous of imitating it; and I hear you exclaiming with disgust-We are no conjurers! we are good Christians! That you are no conjurers, I admit! 'Goethe's greatest merit is the completeness of everything he produces; there are no points which are strong whilst others are weak; there is no part fully painted whilst the other is only sketched. Every character in his romances and dramas is treated, where it occurs, as if it was the principal character: it is so with Homer-so with Shakspeare. In the works of all the great poets there are, properly speaking, no inferior characters at all: every figure is a principal character in its place. When, once upon a time, a French ambassador mentioned to Paul of Russia that a man of consequence in St. Peters burgh was interesting himself in some matter or other, the Czar vehemently interrupted him with these remarkable words-"There is no man of consequence in this empire but him with whom I am actually speaking, and so long only as I am speaking to him is he of consequence. The absolute poet, who has likewise received his power from heaven, considers in the same style those members of his intellectual empire as of the most consequence, whom he is at the moment causing to speak, who have just grown under his pen; and out of this true despotism of art springs that wonderful completeness of the smallest figures in the works of Homer, Shakspeare, and Goethe." The last paragraph of this extract is excellent; though we should be inclined to qualify that portion of it which makes the merit depend wholly on the execution, and little, if at all, on the choice of objects of art. It was Pasta, we believe, who said of a rival. that she was the first in her line, but that her line was not the first ; and the remark suggests a distinction which the reader will find no difficulty in applying for himself. We, on the whole, consider Wallenstein as a grander and a finer drama than any of Goethe's— but shall never be able to believe that Schiller was as great a poet as Goethe-as original in his creations-as wide in his scope of feeling or as exquisitely felicitous in his management of their common language. Heine has candidly confessed the motive of his hostility to Goethe. It were to be wished that he had been equally candid with regard to Schlegel, whom he keeps on plying with every species of ill-natured allusion which the wanton wickedness of wit can suggest. In addition to the sarcasms already mentioned, the dress and personal appearance of this distinguished writer, his mode of lecturing, the furniture of his lecture-room, the circumstances of his marriage, &c. &c., are all deemed fit subjects for quizzing. We are told (what cannot be true) that, unable to live without the pomp and circumstance of reception, to which he had been accustomed as the companion of Madame de Staël, he offered, after her death, to attend Catalani in her progresses; and in reply to Schlegel's assertion, that he saw neither poetry nor poets during his last visit to Paris, Heine says that this is easy of explanation, as Schlegel did nothing the whole time but admire himself in a pocket looking-glass. He even dares to question the great critic's age: Mr. A. W. Schlegel is therefore now (1833) sixty-four years old. Mr. Alexander von Humboldt and other naturalists maintain, however, that he is older. Champollion also was of the same opinion.' Schlegel, however, may well afford to laugh at such pleasantries as this. The rest of the book deals chiefly in individual portraiture. He adds adds to his list of the chief adversaries, a similiar catalogue of the chief supporters, of Goethe-amongst whom Varnhagen von Ense is characterized as a man who carries in his heart thoughts which are as great as the world, and expresses them in words which are as precious and polished as gems.' Varnhagen von Euse is really an admirable critic, who deserves to be better known in this country than he is. Sketches are given of Steffens, Görres, Hoffman, Novalis, Brentano, Von Arnim, &c.; and slight notices of the leading modern metaphysicians-Fichte, Schelling, Böhme, and Hegel-are interwoven, where it becomes necessary to explain their influence upon literature. - A continuation is promised; and on its appearance we shall probably return to this lively and entertaining work. We have, in our translations, studied to be liberal-not at all to be elegant for we wished to give our English readers some notion of what the modern German style of expression is. We are sorry to add that, though Heine's vein in this book is far less irreverent than in his Reisebilder, we have been obliged to mutilate some of the passages which seemed to us deserving of quotation. ART. IX-England, France, Russia, and Turkey. Third Edition. London. 1835. To preserve the independence of Turkey has long been a pri mary object of the foreign policy of France and England, especially of the latter-for we have an Asiatic as well as a European interest at stake; and whatever course her fear of the spread of liberal opinions' may have induced Austria to pursue, since the three glorious days' in France, and the reform in England, have appeared to unite these two powers in support of such changes as she most dreads, there can be no doubt that the possession of Constantinople by Russia would be regarded at Vienna as an evil second only to the propagation of revolutionary principles in Germany. But, notwithstanding these opposing interests, Russia, from the day on which Catherine II. gave to her grandson the name of Constantine, has avowed her ambition to have a third capital on the Bosphorus; and had she not avowed it, her policy has been so unequivocally, perseveringly, and successfully directed to the subjugation of Turkey, that the most careless observation of passing events, or the most cursory perusal of the history of their relations and collisions, could leave no doubt |