life of mismanagement from youth till
middle age. Like Milton, he lost a beloved second wife by childbed in
the first year of marriage: like him, he married a third time, but
without his special necessity--blindness and unkind daughters. He wedded
a lady who had fallen in love with his poetry, or perhaps his poetical
reputation: an union founded, as it appears, in vanity, ended in
vexation of spirit: and as Death, which had deprived him of two wives,
did not release him from a third, he obtained his freedom, at the end of
little more than three years, from a court of justice. Why did Klopstock
undervalue, by preference of such a poet, the lofty-minded Schiller--the
dearest to England of all German bards; perhaps because the author of
Wallenstein was a philosopher, and had many things in his philosophy
which the author of The Messiah could not find in _his_ heaven and
earth. S.C.

He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an immoral author in the
first place, and next, as deficient in power. At Vienna, said he, they
are transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of Vienna
either the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany. He said Wieland was
a charming author, and a sovereign master of his own language: that in
this respect Goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could any
body else. He said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance. I
told him the OBERON had just been translated into English. He asked me
if I was not delighted with the poem. I answered, that I thought the
story began to flag about the seventh or eighth book; and observed, that
it was unworthy of a man of genius to make the interest of a long poem
turn entirely upon animal gratification. He seemed at first disposed to
excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and
that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered,
that I thought the _passion_ of love as well suited to the purposes of
poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing to
fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere
_appetite_. Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every
body. I answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise
people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and
confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work
like the OBERON. He spoke in raptures of Wieland's style, and pointed
out the passage where R