nd they go between coffee and supper in their ordinary
clothes. Even in Berlin women do not wear full dress at any theatre.
In the little towns you may any evening meet or join the leisurely
stream of playgoers, and if you enter the theatre with them you will
find that the women leave their hats with an attendant. You are in no
danger in Germany of having the whole stage hidden from you by flowers
and feathers.

Shakespeare is as much played as Goethe and Schiller, and it is most
interesting and yet most disappointing to hear the poetry you know
line upon line spoken in a foreign tongue. Germans say that their
translation is more beautiful and satisfying than the original
English; but I actually knew a German who kept Bayard Taylor's _Faust_
by his bedside because he preferred it to Goethe's. I think there is
something the matter with people who prefer translated to original
poetry, but I will leave a critic of standing to explain what ails
them. I have never met a German who would admit that Shakespeare was
an Englishman. They say that his birth at Stratford-on-Avon was a
little accident, and that he belongs to the world. They say this out
of politeness, because what they really believe is that he belongs to
Germany, and that as a matter of fact Byron is the only great poet
England has ever had. I am not joking. I am not even exaggerating.
This is the real opinion of the German man in the street, and it is
taught in lessons in literature. An English girl went to one of the
best-known teachers in Berlin for lessons in German, and found, as she
found elsewhere, that the talk incessantly turned on the crimes of
England and the inferiority of England.

"You have had two great names," said the teacher,--"two and no more.
That is, if one can in any sense of the word call Shakespeare an
English name ... Shakespeare and Byron, ... then you have finished.
You have never had anyone else, and Shakespeare has always belonged
more to us than to you."

The English girl gasped, for she knew something of her own literature.

"But have you never heard about Chaucer," she asked, "or of the
Elizabethans, or of Milton, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth...?"

"_Reden Sie nicht, reden Sie nicht!_" cried the teacher,--"I never
allow my pupils to argue with me. Shakespeare and Byron ... no, Byron
only, ... then England has done."

You still find Byron in every German household where English is read
at all, and no one seems to have found out w