is, in truth, a continual strife and
contention between the Ministry and the Opposition, who seem to delight
in nothing so much as in tugging and tearing the state and its resources
to pieces between them, while the hallowed freedom of the hereditary
monarch seems to serve only as an old tree, under whose shades the
contending parties may the more comfortably choose their ground, and
fight out their battles."[H] It is but too manifest, indeed, according to
Schlegel's projection of the universe, that all constitutionalism is,
properly speaking, a sort of political Protestantism, a fretful fever of
the social body, having its origin (like the religious epidemic of the
sixteenth century) in the private conceit of the individual, growing by
violence and strife, and ending in dissolution. This is the ever-repeated
refrain of his political discourses, puerile enough, it may be, to our
rude hearing in Britain, but very grateful to polite and patriotic ears
at Vienna, when the cannon of Wagram was yet sounding in audible echo
beneath their towers. The propounder of such philosophy had not only the
common necessity of all philosophers to pile up his political in majestic
consistency with his ecclesiastical creed, but he had also to pay back
the mad French liberalism with something more mad if possible, and more
despotic. And if also Danton, and Mirabeau, and Robespierre, and other
terrible Avatars of the destroying Siva in Paris, had raised his
naturally romantic temperament a little into the febrile and delirious
now and then, what wonder? Shall the devil walk the public streets at
noon day, and men not be afraid?

[Footnote H: _Philosophie des Lebens_, p.407.]

We said that Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, political and religious, but
chiefly religious, was the grand key to his popular work on the history of
literature. We may illustrate this now by a few instances. In the first
place, the "many-sided" Goethe seems to be as little profound as he is
charitable, when he sees nothing in the Sanscrit studies of the romantic
brothers but a _pis aller_, and a vulgar ambition to bring forward
something new, and make German men stare. We do not answer for the elder
brother; but Frederick certainly made the cruise to the east, as Columbus
did to the west, from a romantic spirit of adventure. He was not pleased
with the old world--he wished to find a new world more to his mind, and,
beyond the Indus, he found it. The Hindoos to him were