e on the people of Germany. In recent times, the
literature of the two countries has almost grown into one. Lord Macaulay's
History has not only been translated into German, but reprinted at Leipzig
in the original; and it is said to have had a larger sale in Germany than
the work of any German historian. Baron Humboldt and Baron Bunsen address
their writings to the English as much as to the German public. The novels
of Dickens and Thackeray are expected with the same impatience at Leipzig
and Berlin as in London. The two great German classics, Schiller and
Goethe, have found their most successful biographers in Carlyle and Lewes;
and several works of German scholarship have met with more attentive and
thoughtful readers in the colleges of England than in the universities of
Germany. Goethe's idea of a world-literature has, to a certain extent,
been realized; and the strong feeling of sympathy between the best classes
in both countries holds out a hope that, for many years to come, the
supremacy of the Teutonic race, not only in Europe, but over all the
world, will be maintained in common by the two champions of political
freedom and of the liberty of thought,--Protestant England and Protestant
Germany.

The interest, however, which Englishmen take in German literature has
hitherto been confined almost exclusively to the literature of the last
fifty years, and very little is known of those fourteen centuries during
which the German language had been growing up and gathering strength for
the great triumphs which were achieved by Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe.
Nor is this to be wondered at. The number of people in England, who take
any interest in the early history of their own literature, is extremely
small, and there is as yet no history of English literature worthy of that
name. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in England many people will
care to read in the original the ancient epic poems of the "Nibelunge" or
"Gudrun," or acquire a grammatical knowledge of the Gothic of Ulfilas and
the Old High-German of Otfried. Gothic, Old High-German, and Middle
High-German are three distinct languages, each possessing its own grammar,
each differing from the others and from Modern German more materially than
the Greek of Homer differs from the Greek of Demosthenes. Even in Germany
these languages are studied only by professional antiquarians and
scholars, and they do not form part of the general system of instruction
in publ