and his theory of the drama is a perverse one; he waged war on bigotry and blind faith; but he did not leave religion on a firmer foundation. In short, he attacked admirably; he opposed triumphantly; but, except through his influence, he has added little to the sum of human happiness and intelligence.

Lessing was a reasonable admirer of Klopstock. Their contemporary and coadjutor in revolutionizing German taste, was Wieland. The literary career of Wieland is psychologically curious. He began as a religious enthusiast; and, afterwards, had all the pretensions of a free-thinker; he was in youth prudishly and effeminately moral; and by and by was able to tell a coarse story without blushing. Of the leading German writers, he interests us the least: it is but fair to say this; and, while we write of him, we feel no veneration for his genius or his literary career.

An agreeable style in narration, a pleasant cheerfulness of mind, a great extent and variety of acquisitions, a literary industry which kept him on the theatre of action full sixty years, are claims to praise, which do not necessarily imply great powers of mind; and which we readily acknowledge belong to Wieland. But he had no elevation of mind; no genuine sublimity of feeling; no strong or noble impulse of passion. We almost fear to describe him as we think he deserves, so little does he, in our view, possess, of the only qualities that make the pursuit of letters honourable.

Wieland was born at Biberach, in Suabia, in 1733, and lived till 1812. His father was a poor clergyman. In his boyhood, Wieland made himself familiar with the two classic languages, especially with the Greek. While yet a beardless youth, he fell in love with a lady, a little older than himself, whom his boyish fancy invested with all possible perfections. The lady had had an adventurous love affair with an Italian; whom, but for a difference in religion, and the consequent opposition of her father, she would have married. Wieland heard a sermon from the text, God is love; and, on a solitary walk with Sophia, declared how imperfectly, it seemed to him, the subject had been treated; and, talking of love with a young lady, he straightway fell into dithyrambics. The lady may have found his notions confused, and so charged him to commit his thoughts to writing. He forthwith shut himself up, and produced a didactic poem on the Nature of Things. The poem is poor enough; and it is no discredit to a very young man, to make poor verses; but Wieland, in his more advanced age, had the weakness to incorporate that and other trash into the body of his works; and so it may be remembered against him, with other equally indifferent productions of his first period. At the University, he was gentle, and avoided all that was rough and wild in the manners of students. Having little natural im

pulse to mix with men, in busy scenes, he developed the pure feelings of an ingenuous mind; he prosed morality; he was for ever prating of his ideas of moral worth. He wrote an AntiOvid, Moral Letters, and other pieces, in a vein of sickly and purely contemplative love of virtue. Bodmer was charmed with him; and, having found in Klopstock, a man not easily managed, he now believed he had, in Wieland, the fittest heir to his mantle, that the world could offer; and Wieland directly began to indite verses on a patriarchal subject, with moderate talent and success. He was the very model of propriety in his writings; and to be guilty of a double entendre, was a sin, which, for the world, he would not bring upon his soul. He studied Plato; and his ideas of love were eminently Platonic. But he grew older; the world, after all, was not an Eden; and he found, that he had been gulled, or rather that he had deceived himself, in his estimate of mankind. Vexed at his mistake, he wheeled directly about. He, who had been in high odour with the saints, all of a sudden assumed a character most offensive in their nostrils. Having had scruples of conscience about any remote, indecent allusion, he now talked as lightly as any decent roué of the times. He gave up religious feeling; he cared as little for the patriarchs, as for the Capulets; he took his vengeance on mankind, for having thought too well of them, by now thinking them all hypocrites; he made a jest of woman's virtue; and, in Oberon, and in Agathon, his greatest productions, and in a dozen other smaller works, he shows how little he esteems the self-denying virtues of man. The woman he had loved, marries another. He returns from Switzerland to Biberach; obtains an office about as literary as that of a clerk of one of our courts; married a woman neither pretty nor witty, but a good housekeeper; kept always in good humour, and wrote books incessantly. Tired at last of his office, he was appointed a professor at Erfurt, where he did not stay long, and where his talents did not fit him to shine; and, in 1772, he was appointed by Amalia, the celebrated, and most deservedly celebrated Dutchess of Saxe-Weimar, to superintend the education of her sons.

Wieland, in this second period, drew his system of philosophy partly from Shaftesbury, partly from Helvetius. Of a world to come, we hear little from him. Still he commended virtue, though as a sort of heroism, not to be expected from every body, but to be admired when it appeared; and esteemed morality, be cause it was graceful and becoming. Having been a visionary, he turned satirist; and having himself been as religious and as weak as Bodmer, he now mocked at enthusiasm, and ridiculed his master. Lucian and Cervantes pleased him as satirists; Ariosto, as a poet. As a man, he was very fond of Germany;

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yet, in his works, there is nothing of a national spirit. He writes gracefully, but without energy; his style is diffuse, and the critics used to wish, good naturedly, on his birth-day, that the thread of his life might be spun out as long as his ideas in his own periods. His poetry shows what books he has been reading. It is often grossly indecent-never morally sublime. He had a sort of philosophy of the senses, deeming goodness to consist in a certain moral loveliness and grace; yet he seems to have had no conception of the genuine sublimity and surpassing beauty of moral purity.

How shall we explain the apparent differences in Wieland's literary career? By denying him all originality. He was roused to action by Klopstock; he wore the fetters of Bodmer; he understood one half of the philosophy of Plato; he patched up a theory for himself, out of Shaftesbury and the French school; he imitated (most unsuccessfully,) Don Quixote; he stole from Ariosto; he pilfered from all quarters; he closed his career as a translator. He had no inventive power; he had no genius. In 1762, he translated Shakspeare; and, by doing so, operated most auspiciously on German literature; but his translation has long since been superseded. Klopstock thought meanly of him; and, in Schiller's Almanack, he is called the "graceful girl of Weimar, of a well-stored mind, but insipid and vain." The study of his works has not taught us to respect him.

Comparing him, as a poet, with his illustrious contemporary, we must say, that Wieland and Klopstock are of opposite polarities; those whom the one attracts, the other as surely repels. Wieland treats of actual life, Klopstock of sentiment; Klopstock is heavenly minded, Wieland is earthly to excess; Klopstock is elegiac, Wieland is gay; Klopstock excels in lyric verse, Wieland in narrative; the former despised rhyme, the latter delighted in it; Klopstock is an eagle, soaring through the clouds to the sun; Wieland a starling, that insults all the passers by.

We have thus endeavoured to illustrate the character of the three most distinguished German writers, in the first period of reviving literature in Germany. Each filled a large and important part; and, by exciting a national spirit, by exercising the severity of criticism, and by keeping in favour the blandishments of rhyme in narrative poetry, they divided among themselves the labour of restoring letters in their country. We should do injustice to the fertility, even of that period, if we did not allude to the throngs of inferior writers, who gathered in groups round the illustrious triumvirate. In Prussia, Frederic suffered several to gain a good degree of popularity, without encouragement or reward; indeed to one, a poetess, a person indeed of no very elevated character or worth, he sent, as a present, two Prussian dollars. Gleim began his career as a feeble imitator of Anacreon;

then composed fables of no decisive value; and at last, in the seven years' war, wrote war songs, which met with general admiration, and continue to live in the memory of his nation. He possessed alike the friendship of Klopstock and Wieland; and, preserving the vivacity of youthful feeling during a life of eightyfour years, will long be remembered for his poetry, his friendship, and his benevolence.

Kleist, an officer in the Prussian service, was a friend of Gleim's, and a favourite with the public. Having obtained the rank of major, he distinguished himself in the battle of Kunersdorff, which was gained by the Russians. He stormed three batteries; and, leading on the attack of a fourth, he fell, wounded, from his horse, exclaiming to his regiment, " My children, desert not your king." His poetry is marked by a gentle melancholy, and an eye for nature.-Ramler, an imitator of Horace, took great pains with his style; but he has neither depth nor earnestness; his poems are artificial and cold.

At the University of Leipzig, several young men nourished in each other the love of poetry, and maintained their independence of Gottsched. The fables of Gellert were, in their day, very popular. When Frederick II. was at Leipzig, Gellert was presented to him; and Frederick pronounced him the cleverest of the German scholars with whom he had conversed. He was sickly and hypochondriacal; without inventive talent or power; but distinguished for the simplicity of his religious character. His style is clear and correct. His influence may have been good; his permanent value is inconsiderable. The satires of Rabener are deficient in originality and variety; himself cheerful, he was employed in the tax-gatherer's department in Saxony; satires on persons in high life he had prepared, and announced them as to be published after his death. Of their merít, nothing can ever be known; in the bombardment of Dresden, his house, and with it his papers, were burnt. So the character of the sovereigns of that day is unimpeached by the satirist. Of Cronegk much was expected; his character was eminently amiable; his talent distinguished. His tragedy, Codrus, met with a success which he did not live to enjoy. For the rest, in the little which he had time to finish, he followed established usage. Kästner, too, afterwards professor in Göttingen, and famous over all Europe, in his day, as a mathematician, wrote epigrams, which have a great deal of caustic humour, and, though sometimes coarse, are generally exceedingly sharp and severe.

Gessner, the Swiss, was intended for a bookseller. His fortune as a writer has been great; in almost all the languages of Europe, there are translations of some of his works; but his merit is moderate. He is altogether too innocent and tender. It will never do to have, for page after page, nothing but the bleating of lambs

and innocents; a lion must now and then roar; though the roaring of Gessner, harmless as that of honest Bottom, would be such, that "the ladies need not be afeard." And Zimmerman, too, likewise by birth a Swiss, and a physician of some merit-how came he by his fame as a writer? He was a fine specimen of the melancholic temperament, excessively given to vanity and hypochondria. Before he was much noticed, he was a man of real worth, of good talents, and extensive knowledge; but flattery spoiled him outright. His vanity was not the vanity of self-complacency, which is amiable and harmless, and belongs to the sanguineous man; but the passionate thirst for distinction; a perpetual contemplation of himself, which needed to be kept in good humour by perpetual adulation from others. His success at the courts of Hanover and Berlin, might seem to have made his station enviable; but he led a miserable life. He was such a capricious, irritable man, in his family, that his son ran away, and his daughter had none of the pleasant gentleness of her sex in his presence; once, in the house of another, she fell at the feet of a lady, with whom her acquaintance was transient, begging her to rescue her from her father.

The name of Winckelman is not to be pronounced without veneration for his merits, and sorrow for the miseries of his life. The whole circle of human knowledge does not possess a more cheerful subject of study than that of ancient art, to which he devoted himself; it is exclusively employed in the observation of beautiful forms, and traces the history of the human mind, as exercised in representing objects of imitated or ideal loveliness. And we know not the man of superior mind, whose life has been less favoured by the ordinary gifts of fortune. He was the son of a poor shoemaker, in a town of little note. At the public school, the aged master was pleased with him, and took him into his house; and when the old man grew blind, Winckelman used to be his guide and to read to him, receiving in return the benefit of his conversation. When seventeen years old, Winckelman found his way to a gymnasium in Berlin; and, at the time that the library of the learned Fabricius was sold at auction, in Hamburgh, he went all the dreary distance between those cities, on foot, to buy a few ancient classics, with money which he begged on the way. At Halle, in 1738-9, where he was supported by small pittances of charities, he neglected the study of a profession, and gave himself to that of the ancients and the arts. One year he was private teacher in a family; then he removed to Jena, where he learned English and Italian; he was again private teacher, and then a subordinate master in a public school. Finally, when twenty-nine years old, he obtained a place in the employ of the Saxon minister, near Dresden, with a salary of fifty-six dollars. And here he was contented and happy; for now