r les noms. Nos auteurs ont, ce me
semble, toujours peche, faute de discerner les choses essentielles
des accessoires, d'eclaircir les faits, de reserrer leur prose
trainante et excessivement sujette aux inversions, aux nombreuses
epithetes, et d'ecrire en pedants plutot qu'en hommes de genie."

We believe that Frederic would not have said this of a work like that of
M. de Schloezer; and as to Chasot, it is not too much to say that, after
the days of Mollwitz and Hohenfriedberg, the day on which M. de Schloezer
undertook to write his biography was perhaps the most fortunate for his
fame.

1856.

X. SHAKESPEARE.(34)

The city of Frankfort, the birthplace of Goethe, sends her greeting to the
city of Stratford-on-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare. The old free
town of Frankfort, which, since the days of Frederick Barbarossa, has seen
the Emperors of Germany crowned within her walls, might well at all times
speak in the name of Germany. But to-day she sends her greeting, not as
the proud mother of German Emperors, but as the prouder mother of the
greatest among the poets of Germany; and it is from the very house in
which Goethe lived, and which has since become the seat of "the Free
German Institute for Science and Art," that this message of the German
admirers and lovers of Shakespeare has been sent, which I am asked to
present to you, the Mayor and Council of Stratford-on-Avon.

When honor was to be done to the memory of Shakespeare, Germany could not
be absent, for next to Goethe and Schiller there is no poet so truly loved
by us, so thoroughly our own, as your Shakespeare. He is no stranger with
us, no mere classic, like Homer, or Virgil, or Dante, or Corneille, whom
we admire as we admire a marble statue. He has become one of ourselves,
holding his own place in the history of our literature, applauded in our
theatres, read in our cottages, studied, known, loved, "as far as sounds
the German tongue." There is many a student in Germany who has learned
English solely in order to read Shakespeare in the original, and yet we
possess a translation of Shakespeare with which few translations of any
work can vie in any language. What we in Germany owe to Shakespeare must
be read in the history of our literature. Goethe was proud to call himself
a pupil of Shakespeare. I shall at this moment allude to one debt of
gratitude only which Germany owes to the poet of Stratford-on-Avon. I do
not speak