n correctness"; that the French tragedies are full of
pompous affectation; and that from the middle of the seventeenth century,
a constrained and affected manner had prevailed throughout Europe,
symbolised by the wig worn by Louis XIV. in pictures and bas-reliefs,
where he is portrayed sometimes as Jupiter and sometimes as Hercules clad
only in his lion's skin--but always with the perruque. Heine complains
that Mme. de Stael fell into the hands of the Schlegels, when in Germany,
and that her account of German literature was coloured by their
prejudices; that William Schlegel, in particular, became her escort at
all the capitals of Europe and won great _eclat_ thereby

Schlegel's elegiac lament over the decay of chivalry may remind the
English reader of the famous passage in Burke[10] about Marie Antoinette.
"Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen
upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of
cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their
scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the
age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators
has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never,
never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that
proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the
heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an
exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of
nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It
is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which
felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated
ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself
lost half its evil by losing all its grossness." [11]

But Burke's reaction against the levelling spirit of French democracy was
by no means so thoroughgoing as the romanticist protest in Germany. It
was manifestly impossible to revive the orders of chivalry, as a
practical military system; or to recreate the feudal tenures in their
entirety. Nor did even the most romantic of the German romanticists
dream of this. They appealed, however, to the knightly principles of
devotion to church and king, of honour, of religious faith, and of
personal loyalty to the suzerain and the nobility. It was these
political and theological aspects o