ic schools and universities. The study of Gothic grammar alone
(where we still find a dual in addition to the singular and plural, and
where some tenses of the passive are still formed, as in Greek and Latin,
without auxiliary verbs), would require as much time as the study of Greek
grammar, though it would not offer the key to a literature like that of
Greece. Old High-German, again, is as difficult a language to a German as
Anglo-Saxon is to an Englishman; and the Middle High-German of the
"Nibelunge," of Wolfram, and Walther, nay even of Eckhart and Tauler, is
more remote from the language of Goethe than Chaucer is from Tennyson.

But, without acquiring a grammatical knowledge of these ancient languages,
there are, I believe, not a few people who wish to know something of the
history of German literature. Nor is this, if properly taught, a subject
of narrow or merely antiquarian interest. The history of literature
reflects and helps us to interpret the political history of a country. It
contains, as it were, the confession which every generation, before it
passed away, has made to posterity. "Without Literary History," as Lord
Bacon says, "the History of the World seemeth to be as the Statue of
Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being wanting which doth most shew
the spirit and life of the person." From this point of view the historian
of literature learns to value what to the critic would seem unmeaning and
tedious, and he is loath to miss the works even of mediocre poets, where
they throw light on the times in which they lived, and serve to connect
the otherwise disjointed productions of men of the highest genius,
separated, as these necessarily are, by long intervals in the annals of
every country.

Although there exists no literature to reward the student of Gothic, yet
every one who cares for the history of Germany and of German thought
should know something of Ulfilas, the great Bishop of the Goths, who
anticipated the work of Luther by more than a thousand years, and who, at
a time when Greek and Latin were the only two respectable and orthodox
languages of Europe, dared for the first time to translate the Bible into
the vulgar tongue of Barbarians, as if foreseeing with a prophetic eye the
destiny of these Teutonic tribes, whose language, after Greek and Latin
had died away, was to become the life-spring of the Gospel over the whole
civilized world. He ought to know something of those early missionaries
a