humours of
it. Nothing can be more expressive of a conceited, narrow-minded
reviewer. 'Oh he!--he is absolutely everywhere,--What others dance, he
must decide upon. If he can't chatter about every step, 'tis as good as
not made at all. _Nothing provokes him so much as when we go forward_.
If you'd turn round and round in a circle, as he does in his old mill,
he'd approve of that perhaps; especially if you'd consult him about it.'

'A man of such spirited habitudes,' says Mr. Carlyle, after affirming
that Nicolai wrote against Kant's philosophy without comprehending it,
and judged of poetry, as of Brunswick Mum, by its utility, 'is now by
the Germans called a _Philister_. Nicolai earned for himself the painful
pre-eminence of being _Erz Philister_, Arch Philistine.' 'He, an old
enemy of Goethe's,' says Mr. Hill, in explanation of the title in which
he appears in the _Walpurgisnacht_, 'had published an account of his
phantasmal illusions, pointing them against Fichte's system of idealism,
which he evidently confounded with what Coleridge would have called
Subjective Idolism.'

Such was this wondrous _disenchanter_ in the eyes of later critics than
Klopstock: a man strong enough to maintain a long fight against genius,
not wise enough to believe in it and befriend it. How many a
controversialist seems a mighty giant to those who are predisposed to
his opinions, while, in the eyes of others, he is but a blind
floundering Polyphemus, who knows not how to direct his heavy blows; if
not a menacing scarecrow, with a stake in his hand, which he has no
power to drive home! I remember reading a thin volume in which all
metaphysicians that had ever left their thoughts behind them were
declared utterly in the wrong--all up to, but not including, the valiant
author himself. The world had lain in darkness till he appeared, like a
new Phoebus, on the scene. This great man despatched Kant's
system--(never having read a syllable of any work of Kant's)--in a page
and a quarter! and the exploit had its celebraters and admirers. Yet
strange to say, the metaphysical world went on just as if nothing had
happened!--after the sun was up, it went groping about, as if it had
never been enlightened, and actually ever since has continued to talk as
if Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and other metaphysicians understood the
nature of the things they wrote about rather _more_ than the mass of
mankind, instead of _less! Verschwindet doch_! might this au