Their success enabled him merely to support existence, without relieving his penury. The war of 1813, the unsettled state of Germany, and the interruption of all peaceful employments, exposed him to severer want and harder vicissitudes than ever. But a season of fairer hopes was at hand: he obtained the easy station of counsellor in the Court of Exchequer at Berlin. His situation might now be considered enviable: the income of his post was amply sufficient, and its labour not excessive; he was surrounded by his best friends; his public conduct was irreprehensible; and his literary fame was rapidly spreading. He was happy, and had he been wise might have continued happy; but he was not wise, and in his cup of enjoyment there lurked a deadly poison.'

The order of his life, from 1816, downwards,' says his biographer, 'was this: On Mondays and Thursdays he passed his forenoons at his post in the Kammergericht; on other days at home, in working; the afternoons he regularly spent in sleep, to which, in summer, perhaps he added walking: the evenings and nights were devoted to the tavern. Even when out in company, while the other guests went home, he retired to the tavern to await the morning, before which time it was next to impossible to bring him home. Strangers who came to Berlin went to see him in the tavern; the tavern was his study, and his pulpit, and his throne: here his wit flashed and flamed like an Aurora Borealis, and the table was for ever in a roar; and thus, amid tobacco-smoke, and over coarse earthly liquor, was Hoffmann wasting faculties which might have seasoned the nectar of the gods.'-vol. ii., pp. 191, 192.

Thus was this misguided votary of debauch now on the high road to ruin; and the only wonder is, says Mr. Carlisle, that with such fatal speed, he did not reach the gaol even more balefully and sooner. His official duties were, to the last, punctually and irreproachably performed: he composed fancy pieces for magazines more abundantly than ever; and his reputation in Germany, as a romance-writer, continually increased.

Meanwhile, Hoffmann's tavern orgies continued unabated, and his health at last sunk under them. In 1819, he had suffered a renewed attack of the gout; from which, however, he had recovered by a journey to the Silesian baths. On his forty-fifth birth-day, the 24th of January, 1822, he saw his best and oldest friends, including Hitzig and Hippel, assembled round his table; but he himself was sick; no longer hurrying to and fro in hospitable assiduity, as was his custom; but confined to his chair, and drinking bath water, while his guests were enjoying wine. It was his death that lay upon him, and a mournful lingering death. The disease was a Tabes dorsalis; limb by limb, from his feet upwards, for five months, his body stiffened and died. Hoffmann bore his sufferings with inconceivable gaiety; so long as his hands had power he kept writing; afterwards he dictated to an amanuensis; and four of his Tales, the last, Der Feind (The Enemy), discontinued only some few days before his death, were composed in this melancholy season. He would not believe that he was dying, and he longed for life with inexpressible desire. On the evening of the 24th of June, his whole body to the neck had become

stiff and powerless; no longer feeling pain, he said to his doctor: "I shall soon be through it now."-Yes," said the doctor, "You will soon be through it." Next morning he was evidently dying: yet about eleven o'clock he awoke from his stupor; cried that he was well, and would go on with dictating the Feind that night; at the same time calling on his wife to read him the passage where he had stopt. She spoke to him in kind dissuasion: he was silent; he motioned to be turned towards the wall; and in a few minutes Hoffinann was no more.'-vol ii., pp. 193, 194. A few of Mr. Carlisle's comments on his character are sensible

and proper.

'Hoffmann's, says he, was a mind for which proper culture might have done great things: there lay in it the elements of much moral worth, and talents of almost the highest order. Nor was it weakness of will that so far frustrated these fine endowments; for in many trying emergencies, he proved that decision and perseverance of resolve, were by no means denied him. Unhappily, however, he had found no sure principle of action; no truth adequate to the guidance of such a mind. What in common minds is called prudence, was not wanting, could this have sufficed; for it is to be observed, that so long as he was poor, so long as the fetters of every-day duty lay round him, Hoffmann was diligent, unblameable, and even praiseworthy; but these wants once supplied, these fetters once cast off, his wayward spirit was without fit direction or restraint, and its fine faculties rioted in wild disorder. In the practical concerns of life, he felt no interest; in religion he seems not to have believed, or even disbelieved; he never talked of it, nor would hear it talked of.'

On the literary qualities of this unhappy man, or the intellectual peculiarities of his writings, it is scarcely necessary for us, after Mr. Carlisle's example, to add many comments. The only tale from his pen-'The Golden Pot,'-which appears in these volumes, is disfigured by all the usual and outrageous extravagance of his conceptions, without the redeeming strength of delineation which is occasionally to be found in his narratives. In general, his tales defy either abridgment or analysis: so wild and unconnected, and often too, so unmeaning are the flights of his imagination, that the endeavour to subject them to any standard of criticism, would be as vain as the attempt to compose musical notes to the ravings of a madman or a bacchanal; and the source from whence he too frequently drew his inspiration, would be perceptible enough, even if his biographer had failed to present us with the faithful and lamentable spectacle of his habitual propensities.

In Mr. Carlisle's third volume, we are introduced to a far different picture from that which is exhibited in the character and writings of Hoffmann:-a picture of a gentle and religious spirit, displaying its workings in reverence to God, and kindly sympathy for man. This volume is filled with selections from the writings of one of the most benevolent and original children of genius whom Germany has ever produced, the amiable, though eccentric

Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. Of his life, Mr. Carlisle has been able to render but a very barren account; but the little which he has to tell us of his personal character is highly favourable, and the rest is to be gathered from the spirit of his writings. John Paul has not long closed his peaceful existence; and as two German biographies of him have been announced in the press, we may hope to see the essence of them transmitted into an English memoir, at no very distant period.

Richter deserves the blended character which our commentator has assigned to him, of 'a moralist and a sage, no less than a poet and a wit.' Neither his numerous essays, his poetry, nor his novels, are much known in England: for his language is not always very intelligible even to his own countrymen, and its peculiarities and difficulties are of course not diminished by the translation. Mr. Carlisle whimsically, but aptly illustrates it, as that of a Burton writing, not an Anatomy of Melancholy, but a foreign romance, through the scriptory organs of a Jeremy Bentham.' Hence, we may add, John Paul has been unsparingly accused of affectation, while in fact he is only unaffectedly eccentric and original. His intellect is keen, philosophical and lofty; his learning is immense; his imagination is vast and overpowering: but his knowledge lies in chaotic magnitude and singularity, and his spirit often expands into boundless air, and loses itself in shadowy clouds. His most attractive qualities of mind, however, are genuine humour and affectionate sensibility: and in his novels, he often reminds us of the charming simplicity and naiveté of our own Goldsmith. Mr. Carlisle's specimens of his tales are exceedingly well chosen to familiarize the reader with the most captivating qualities of his mind. One of the little novels in this volume, is the Army Chaplain Schmelzle's Journey to Flætz,'a most humorous auto-biography of an habitual coward, who, with a perpetual vaunting of his courage, trembles at every step of his course through life. The other tale, which makes up the contents of the volume, is the Life of Quintus Fixlein.' This piece merely recounts the struggles of a poor clerical student, whose aspirations are directed to, and finally gratified by, his induction to a country living, and marriage with the object of his affection. The whole story is full of the quiet domestic interest that belongs to our English novel of middle life.

It is much to be regretted, that the difficulties of rendering John Paul are almost insuperable. In fact, much of his language is quite untranslateable; and its perplexities to a foreigner may be conceived, when it is known that a German lexicon of the unusual modes of speech which occur in his writings,' has been an acceptable present to his native readers! We can, therefore, well make allowances for the embarrassment which Mr. Carlisle has suffered in this part of his task: but he certainly does appear to us to have, in some instances, left his text in needless obscurity.

Thus, he often permits a term to remain in the original unexplained, the import of which he might readily have stated. For instance (p. 129), what can the English reader understand by Rittmeisterinn? The German scholar, who, of course, knows that Rittmeister means a captain of cavalry, and that the additional inn changes the sex, (as in könig, king, königinn, queen), is at once struck with the quaintness and drollery of the title; but this is lost upon the uninitiated. Again (p. 132), Mr. Carlisle renders the passage, that Zobedäus could never enter in his note book the name of a person of quality, without writing an H for Herr, before it. Now, even those of our countrymen who know that the word Herr means Sir, or Mr., will scarcely, without an explanation, understand it in the aristocratic force which a German assigns to it, especially if it be preceded by the von. In another place, by the way, Mr. Carlisle gives your grace for Euer Gnaden, which simply means your honour, or your ladyship; and, mirabile dictu, the author of Vivian Grey, going a step farther in absurd blundering, renders the same term by your highness, and actually makes the servant so address him throughout the whole book! To return to Mr. Carlisle, why has he (p. 137,) manufactured the clumsy compound, address-calendar, for a word which signifies only a directory? and why, in the next page, and passim, has he not rendered hammerherrs and räths, (hammerherren and räthe he should have said, if he desired to retain the real German plural,) by the obvious English substitutes of chamberlains and counsellors? How is the English reader to comprehend these untranslated German titles?

The fourth and last of these volumes before us, contains only the Wilhelm Meister's Travels of Göthe, introduced as usual by a biographical sketch of that celebrated writer. The tale is well known. The biographical essay is really a composition of great merit. It is valuable, not so much for the incidents related in the life of Göthe for it is, in so far, only a very meagre and unsatisfactory abridgment of his auto-biography, of which a translation (not a good one,) has already been made through a French version into English. But the recommendation of the essay before us, is its sound and judicious criticism, not only upon the writings of Göthe himself, but upon the age or school of German literature, of which he has been the principal creator. To one passage in particular, from this essay, we would fain give place for its able developement of that revolution in German literature, of which, as is justly observed, the writings of Göthe were among the prominent causes, or at least, the earliest signals.

The works just mentioned (Gotz von Berlichingen, and the Sorrows of Werter), though noble specimens of youthful talent, are still not so much distinguished by their intrinsic merits, as by their splendid fortune. It would be difficult to name two books which have exercised a deeper influence on the subsequent literature of Europe, than these two performances of a young author; his first fruits, the produce of his twenty-fourth year.

Werter appeared to seize the hearts of men in all quarters of the world, and to utter for them the word which they had long been waiting to hear. As usually happens, too, this same word once uttered was soon abundantly repeated; spoken in all dialects, and chanted through all the notes of the gamut, till at length the sound of it had grown a weariness rather than a pleasure. Sceptical sentimentality, view-bunting, love, friendship, suicide, and desperation, became the staple of literary ware; and though the epidemic, after a long course of years, subsided in Germany, it re-appeared with various modifications in other countries; and everywhere abundant traces of its good and bad effects are still to be discerned. The fortune of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, though less sudden, was by no means less exalted. In his own country, Götz, though he now stands solitary and childless, became the parent of an innumerable progeny of chivalry plays, feudal delineations, and poetico-antiquarian performances; which, though long ago deceased, made noise enough in their day and generation and with ourselves, his influence has been perhaps still more remarkable. Sir Walter Scott's first literary enterprise was a translation of Götz von Berlichingen: and if genius could be communicated like instruction, we might call this work of Goethe's the prime cause of Marmion and the Lady of the Lake, with all that has followed from the same creative hand. Truly, a grain of seed that has lighted in the right soil! For if not firmer and fairer, it has grown to be taller and broader than any other tree; and all the nations of the earth are still yearly gathering of its fruit.

'But overlooking these spiritual genealogies, which bring little certainty and little profit, it may be sufficient to observe of Berlichingen and Werter, that they stand prominent among the causes, or, at the very least, among the signals, of a great change in modern literature. The former directed men's attention with a new force to the picturesque effects of the past; and the latter, for the first time, attempted the more accurate delineation of a class of feelings, deeply important to modern minds; but for which our elder poetry offered no exponent, and perhaps could offer none, because they are feelings that arise from passion incapable of being converted into action, and belong chiefly to an age as indolent, cultivated, and unbelieving, as our own. This, notwithstanding the dash of falsehood which may exist in Werter itself, and the boundless delirium of extravagance which it called forth in others, is a high praise which cannot justly be denied it. The English reader ought also to understand that our current version of Werter is mutilated and inaccurate: it comes to us through the all-subduing medium of the French; shorn of its caustic strength; with its melancholy rendered maudlin; its hero reduced from the stately gloom of a broken-hearted poet to the tearful wrangling of a dyspeptic tailor.

• One of the very first to perceive the faults of these works, and the ridiculous extravagance of their imitators, was Goethe himself. In this unlooked-for and unexampled popularity, he was far from feeling that he had attained his object: this first out-pouring of his soul had calmed its agitations, not exhausted or even indicated its strength; and he now began to see afar off a much higher region, as well as glimpses of the track by which it might be reached. To cultivate his own spirit, not only as an author, but as a man; to obtain dominion over it, and wield its resources as instruments in the service of what seemed good and beautiful, had been his