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adversaries. A similar explanation ought no doubt to be given to some other still more crying and afflicting phenomena of the time.

I had rather praise the Schelling of former days than enter deeper on the man as he now is! The memory of that Schelling will blaze for ever in the annals of German thought. He re-established nature in her legitimate rights, he desired the reconciliation of spirit and matter, and sought to reunite both in the eternal soul of the world. He restored that grand Philosophy of Nature which we find among the ancient Greeks before Socrates. [!!!] He restored that magnificent philosophy of nature which, growing quietly out of the old Pantheistic religion of Germany, began as early as the days of Paracelsus to show some most beautiful flowers, but was afterwards choked by the introduction of Cartesianism. Alas! he ended by restoring things of a far different character. He was in consequence shamefully expelled from the throne of thought; his own mayor of the palace, Hegel, took his crown and gave him the tonsure, and since that time the dispossessed Schelling may be seen wandering about like a poor laybrother among the monkery of Munich-or, to give the place its appropriate Latin name-in Monacho Monachorum. As for Hegel, he had himself crowned, and, I am sorry to say, something like anointed too, at Berlin.'-p. 230.

From the last sentence we infer that, like Kant and Fichte and Schelling, Hegel too has already begun to show symptoms of apostacy! What else means the hint about anointed? As for Schelling's conversion to Christianity being the result of intellectual exhaustion-it is sufficient to observe that his admirable exertions as a profound Naturalist belong to a subsequent period-and that his general reputation stands higher at this hour than it did at any former time.

And now for the fuller exposition which we promised our readers, of the style in which we may expect to see the results of the Kantish, Fichteish, Hegelish, and Heinish doctrines ere long exhibit their fruits. We need not call attention to the writer's admissions respecting the Christianity which he abhors.

"The philosophy of Germany is an important affair which concerns the whole human race; and our great-grand-children alone will be in a position to decide whether we should have praise or blame for having worked out our philosophy in the first place-our revolution in the second. I think the order we have adopted was that worthy of a methodical people. Heads which philosophy has employed in meditation might have been mowed down at pleasure by revolution; but philosophy could have made no use of heads thus dealt with by revolution. But nevertheless, my dear countrymen, be in no distress: the German revolution will be neither the more gay nor the more mild, that it was preceded by the Critik of Kant, the transcendental Idealism of Fichte, and the Philosophy of Nature: these doctrines have developed revolutionary forces which now only wait the moment to explode and

fill the world with terror and admiration. Then will appear Kantists who will hear no more of reverence in the world of deeds than in the world of ideas, and who will turn up without pity, with axe and sword, the soil of our European life, in order to extirpate the last roots of the past. On the same scene will come armed Fichteans, whose fanaticism of Will can be mastered neither by fear nor by interest; for they live in spirit and despise matter. But the most fearful of all will be the Philosophers of Nature, when they take an active part in a German revolution, and identify themselves with the work of destruction; for if the hand of the Kantist strikes firmly and surely, because his heart is inaccessible to any traditional respect-if the Fichtean despises all dangers because they have for him no real existence-the Philosopher of Nature will be terrible indeed when he places himself in communication with the original powers of the earth, conjures up the hidden resources of tradition, evokes the whole force of the antique German Pantheism, and re-awakes that ardour of battle which the old Germans displayed an ardour which had not for its object destruction nor even victory, but merely the pleasure of the combat itself. Christianity has softened to a certain extent that brutal rage of battle, but it has not been able to extinguish it, and soon as the Cross, the restraining talisman, is broken, you shall see let loose again all the ferocity and frenzied exaltation of the Berserkers, sung by the poets of the north. The old warlike divinities will rouse themselves from their fabulous tombs, and wipe the dust of ages from their eyelids: Thor will be stirring again with his gigantic hammer, and woe to the cathedrals! There will be performed a drama, compared to which the French Revolution was but an innocent idyll. The nations will group themselves around Germany as on the ascending benches of an amphitheatre, and great and terrible are the games that await their eyes.'-p. 238.

We now reach chapters in which the general English reader will find more to amuse, if not to instruct him, than in those devoted either to the Atheistical or Pantheistical doctors of the German aniversities-the chapters in which Heine gives us his views of the great and popular literary men, who have been in our day enlisted on both sides of this national controversy. Goethe, we have already been told, was a Pantheist-but Heine has to admit that he never took any decided or open part in favour of the doctrine. It only revealed itself, he says, in the multifarious character of the works of his art-in the absence throughout the series of any evidence of strong sympathy with any particular system of opinion on any subject whatever-and, lastly, in the sensual drift perceptible and progressive in all that he did as a poet.

'Goethe's indifference was the result of his pantheistic contemplation of the universe. If God be in every thing, it is a matter of absolute indifference about what thing we occupy ourselves, a cloud or an old relievo, a popular ballad or the carcase of an ape, men or comedians.' We do not see that Heine makes any attempt to reconcile this

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account of Goethe with his previous denegation of the natural tendency of Pantheism to produce indifference:-but he proceeds

'As Goethe rejected with scorn the enthusiasm of Christianity, which seemed to him a disgustful thing, so he would have nothing to do with the philosophical enthusiasm of our time, because he feared that, if he gave into that, he should be drawn from his mental tranquillity; so he considered all enthusiasm in a purely historical method, as a certain given material, a something which his art ought to make the best of. Spirit became matter in his hands, and he invested it with the most beautiful and agreeable of forms. It was thus that he became the greatest artist in our literature, and that every thing he wrote was a masterpiece marvellously finished. . . . It is remarkable (of his great works) that the Divan appeared the next after the Faust; the Divan was the last phasis of Goethe; and in writing it, the author, who had in the Faust expressed his repugnance for intellectual abstractions, and his desire of real enjoyments, openly threw himself, soul and body, into the arms of sensualism....... A. W. Schlegel called him bitterly, when this Divan appeared, "A pagan converted to Islamism."-vol. i. p. 324.

We have as yet received nothing like a fair view of Goethe's personal character and history; but we are sorry to say that we think M. Heine has considerable grounds for including that extraordinary man, the greatest poet that Germany has ever produced, and about as feeble a reasoner as ever appeared anywhere, in the catalogue of his pantheistical heroes. He dismisses him in these words :

'The gods leave us. Goethe is dead. He died on the 22d day of the month of March, in the year 1832-that significative year in which our earth lost its greatest illustrations.* One would think that Death that year had become, all at once, aristocratic, and wished to distinguish the notabilities of the world by sending them together to the tomb. Perhaps her intention has been to found a peerage down below in the kingdom of the shades; and, in that case, the batch was well chosen. Or, on the other hand, was it Death's intention to favour democracy in that fatal year, and to forward intellectual equality by burying out of our sight the great authorities? Was it respect, then, or insolence that made her spare the kings? Not a single king died that year. Gods leave us-but kings remain.'-vol. i. p. 328.

From the rest of these chapters we shall content ourselves with extracting some specimens of Heine's elaborate diatribe against the Schlegels. He is far, indeed, from the views which have been lately expressed by one of the most profound and elegant of our own scholars respecting those illustrious brothers, masters of nearly every species of literature, and throwing themselves, at will,

* The melancholy catalogue includes the names of Scott, Crabbe, Mackintosh, Cuvier, Rask, Remusat, Chaptal, Say, and-Goethe!

into the manner and feelings of almost every period of society, whose names form something like an epoch in the history of the human mind.'* Mr. Mitchell speaks perhaps rather too loftilybut assuredly the tone of Heine is much more egregiously below the mark.

'Frederick Schlegel was a man of superior talents to Augustus William; in fact, the latter only subsisted by the ideas of his brother, which he knew how to elaborate with the skill of an artist. Frederick was a deep thinker; he recognized all the splendours of the past, and was alive to all the sufferings of the present, but he did not comprehend the sacredness of those sufferings, and the necessity of them to the future salvation of the world. He saw the sun set, and contemplated with melancholy the place where it had disappeared, lamenting over the darkness which he observed spreading itself over him. He did not dream that the rays of a new day were already brightening the opposite side of the horizon. He has called a historian a prophet reversed; and he could not have given a better description of himself. The present was hateful to him, he dreaded the future, and recognized the good and the glorious in the past alone. The author of Lucinda had expended in his life an excess of presumption and gaiety which he thought blameable; he felt the necessity of expiating the sins of his youth and manhood, and in his advanced years became a Catholic. There is another romance, Florentina, which has often been ascribed to him, and it is in the same libidinous taste, but I believe it was written, not by him, but by his wife, the daughter of the celebrated Moses Mendelsohn, who eloped with him from her first husband, and with him in due season passed into the bosom of the Catholic Church.

I believe that Frederick Schlegel acted with good faith by Catholicism. I think this was the case with him, though not with many of his friends. But in such matters it is not easy to be sure of the truth. Hypocrisy is the twin sister of religion, and they are extremely like each other, so much so, that it is sometimes impossible to distinguish them. The features, the costume, the language are the same. one, nevertheless, is more soft than the other in her method of speaking, and the word love is more frequently on her lips. Here, in France, the one of these sisters is dead, and the other is still in mourning for her.

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Subsequently to the appearance of Madame de Staël's book, Frederick gratified the public with two great works, the best he ever wrote, and worthy of all honourable mention-I mean his Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, and his Lectures on the History of Literature.† By the first of these he at once introduced and

We quote from the preface to Mr. Mitchell's edition of the Wasps of Aristophanes-the second of a series which we are not afraid to say will form, when completed, something like an epoch in the history of British scholarship.

Heine is mistaken as to his dates. The first of these works appeared in 1808the second early in 1812-both previous to the publication of Madame de Staël's Germany.

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established among us the study of the Sanscrit, and became the Sir William Jones of Germany. But even this work was composed with a view to the interests of Catholicism. These clever people had discovered in the old Hindoo poetry not only all the mysteries of the Catholic religion, but even her hierarchy and her struggles with the temporal power. In the Mahabarata and the Ramayuna they found an elephantine middle-age, and when the Priest Wascepta contends. with the King Wismamitra, they saw only another pope striving against another emperor, though the object was not, as in Europe, an investiture, but the cow Sabala. We may apply the same criticism to his Lectures on Literature. Frederick Schlegel has there examined all literatures from a lofty point of view-but this high position of his is always on the belfry of the Catholic Church, and whatever Schlegel says, you can't help hearing the bells jingle about him, and now and then the croaking of the ravens that haunt the old weather-cock. For me the incense of the mass rises to my nose whenever I open the book, and in the best passages I think I detect long files of tonsured thoughts. Yet, I know of no better book of the kind; and, indeed, I don't know where one can procure such a complete view of the literature of all nations, unless by putting together the multifarious lucubrations of Herder.'

We wish this last hint were taken. Herder's view of the literature and philosophy of England during the last century is, in particular, immeasurably superior to Schlegel's; that is, indeed, a wonderful performance-better than anything we as yet have on the subject in our own language-but the whole of the essays alluded to by Heine would richly repay the labour of an English translator. We cannot, in fact, but consider Herder as in criticism generally the leader and master of both the Schlegelswhom he, moreover, surpasses in masculine energy of style. Our author proceeds

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Frederick Schlegel died five years ago, in consequence, as is said, of a gastronomical excess. He was fifty-six years of age. His death occasioned some loathsome altercations of scandal. His friends the priests, who have their head-quarters at Munich, were enraged at the free manner in which the liberal press commented on the career which had just been closed-and they, in their turn, assaulted the German philosophers in no measured terms: still the priests could not say of any liberal among us all that he had carried off the wife of his host, and lived long afterwards on the alms of the outraged husband.'-vol. ii. P. 11.

We must hint our suspicion that Heine prefers Frederick Schlegel to his elder brother chiefly, if not solely, because the one is dead and the other living; but we are, nevertheless, by no means sure that Heine's arrangement of the two is wrong. Frederick was not, like Augustus William, a mere man of lettershe was engaged during the best years of his life in the active diplomatic

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