ase
its introduction may have alarmed honest prejudices, and seemed to
endanger the simplicity of faith and the fervour of devotion. At all
events this is one of the causes which has there contributed to widen
the unfortunate breach between religion and the arts.

To expose these and the various other false tendencies, perversions and
exaggerations of religious feeling in Germany, for all of which, when a
slight allowance is made for the difference of national manners and
characters, the reader will be at no loss to discover parallels at
home, is the Author's design in the second of these Novels. No man was
better qualified for this undertaking than one who, living almost
wholly in a poetical world, has never ceased to keep a watchful eye on
the fluctuations of opinion and feeling among his contemporaries. To
him too it peculiarly belonged to apply a corrective to the now
prevailing extravagances, who formerly attacked, with satire the most
powerful perhaps to be found in modern literature, errours and follies
of an opposite description, and contributed, at least as efficaciously
as any writer in Germany, to produce the moral revolution, of which
this volume exhibits the dark side. It is this that gives a peculiar
charm to the homage which he incidentally pays to Goethe, a charm indeed
inevitably lost on the English reader; but to one who has marked the
progress of these two great poets, their singular diversity of genius
and the seeming divergency of their course, this tribute of veneration
under such circumstances has in it something beautiful and almost
affecting. The passage in other respects is unhappily as intelligible
to the English reader as any in the volume; here too Goethe had scarcely
acquired a partial celebrity before he was attacked on similar grounds,
with perhaps as much sincerity and certainly not less scurrility. In
the execution of his delicate task, the Author has displayed the temper
and spirit befitting a theme, the treatment of which, without the
nicest impartiality, might be mischievous or offensive. In the midst of
the keenest ridicule and the warmest glow of feeling he preserves an
ironical self-possession, such as only a consummate artist can command.
The keeping is every where perfect; the living scene is presented to us
rather in a mirror than a picture.

Though these two little works, especially the latter, are occasional
and even polemical in their origin, they have a value quite indepen