Sterne? Yes, truly, of the contradictory increments of our immortal Lawrence Sterne pathos was a large component; but, unfortunately, it is of the worst kind-of the species prevalent in Paul's country especially, and which Goethe made there fashionable in the guise of Werter; notwithstanding which, Sterne approaches Paul nearer than any other writer who has ever lived; though (to repeat our proposition) the seeming lines of comparison do in reality become, in the end, actual points of contrast: and not the least among the number stands this same sublime pathos in the one, which finds its correlative in the too often morbid sentimentalism of the other. The one is all truth and reality; the other all pounce and powder: the one is Nature, the other mere "Mode"-Non bene mendaci risus componitur ore, wrote the old elegiac bard of Rome: the aphorism is equally true of all simulated susceptibilities, of which Sterne (notwithstanding his other most loveable and truthful qualities) must ever serve as fitting exemplar. Not only in their writings, but in their lives, it is likewise glaringly obvious. What is true of particulars is not true, necessarily, of universals; and it should not surprise us that two individuals, by how much the nearer akin in taste, can yet be by so much the wider apart in character. Both were trained to the service of one Holy Mother, not prone to wean her once adopted offspringthe Church Paul left in youth, and in earnestness, the temple wherein his heart could never have dwelt: Sterne lingered until his dying day a laggard ministrant of an institution whose offices of holiness became, in his hands, an "idle calling."

The wonderful appreciation of the humorous, the felicitous command of diction, and the comprehensive perception of the finer springs and incentives that move the watchwork of the human automaton, as evinced in Sterne's greatest work, "Shandy," at once stamped his fame as a writer wherever the English language was understood. Amongst the first of our neighbours on the continent to recognise the merits of the Englishman, were the Germans: (the French, always jealous of superiority, accused him of cribbing from themselves!) the estimation in which he was held by these, may be seen in the numerous writings of the period contemporary with his ownin none more conspicuously than in the pages of Paul, who seems to have been as little aware of his own immeasureable superiority, as, knowing it, he would have been ready to waive it, without a murmur, in favour of a lesser constellation than his English confrère. Marvellous is it to see with what gusto the

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D

Epicurean Paul feasts upon the "more fat" portions of the Reverend Tristram-no duck in a thundershower ever addressed her to gobble a godsend of newly spawned tadpoles with more avidity than our German Jaques displayed in his descent upon the Wadmans and the Tobys of our divine wag! Strangely enough, his own inimitable and exhaustless humour does not appear to have made similar impressions on Sterne. It is true that few persons in England knew any thing of German at that time, except old Queen Charlotte and her waiting-woman. Moreover, Paul's reputation was not then fixed his star had risen, indeed, but had not reached its right ascension. In poverty and obscurity, penning his "Selections from the Devil's papers," dwelt the marvellous investigator of the "dainty recreations to be digged out from under the brain-pan of a She-Giant." The coteries of Berlin had not, at that time, accepted him for their own. The Leipsig dandies disowned the man who wantonly cut off his queue,* and went about the streets sans cravate (à la Byron, as we should say); as yet he stood upon no pedestal. All this was, however, to come, and did come; and Paul, when the smoke and brimstone of the powder-monkey Revolutionists of Paris had cleared off, and the atmosphere of the thinking world, reassuming somewhat of its wonted serenity, rose, like the mercury in a barometer, to its proper altitude, rapidly gained a position loftier in his own country, than ever Sterne won in his, by the common consent of the critical world.

* In an age when the pig-tail made the man, Paul, then a student at Leipsig, cut off his tail from the direful consequences of which act of sacrilege against his own person a merciful Providence seems to have interposed miraculously in his behalf. Non tali auxilio, said an Englishman on a similar occasion of self-mutilation; but the manifesto issued by Paul on the resumption of his appendage, after heroically enduring a ten years' martyrdom of reprobation, is too good not to be repeated. We give it, as the compiler of the "Life" has done, in Mr. Carlyle's version.

"ADVERTISEMENT.

"The undersigned begs to give notice, that whereas cropped hair has as many enemies as red hair, and said enemies of the hair are likewise enemies of the person it grows upon; whereas, further, such a fashion is in no respect Christian, since, otherwise, Christian persons would adopt it; and whereas especially the undersigned has suffered no less from his hair than Absalom did from his, though on contrary grounds; and whereas it has been notified to him that the public proposed to send him into his grave, since the hair grows there irrespective of scissors, he hereby gives notice that he will not consent to such extremities. He would, therefore, inform the noble, learned, and discerning public in general, that he, the undersigned, proposes on Sunday next to appear in the various important streets of Hof, with a false, short queue; and, with this queue, as with a magnet, and cord of love, and magic rod, to possess himself forcibly of the affection of all and sundry, be they who they may. (Signed) J. P. F. R.”

Perhaps never before or since were the influences of other minds so impotentially exerted upon any notoriously impressible substance, as in the case of Paul. With Goethe he

could find little or no sympathy: he tells us that he approached him with timidity. The Mephistophilean equanimity of the Privy-councillor-Poet-the nil admirari nature of the man whom nothing astounded, who laughed at the abstract, repudiated the ideal, and made belief in no revealed mystery-the antispeculative by nature-repelled him: the ardent Schiller, with his severe aspect, which Paul describes as " Alpine, jagged and angular, full of sharp and cutting asperities," had likewise nothing in common with the dreamy herboriser amongst the lowly affinities of unheroic humanity; and few, accordingly, was the number of Spirits in whose communion his own found companionship. Books formed his world of entertainment, and he commerced with men only in their writings. The profound investigations of a Herder, the archaic meditations of a Wieland, the platonic musings of a Jacobi, and the pure critical elaborations of a Lessing, were the fountains from which his ever-thirsting soul sucked sustenance, as the earth drinks up the shower these were the elements so gratefully imbibed by his succulent spirit, and metamorphosed by its alchemy of inward virtue into those wondrous combinations, which to redissolve into their abnormal gases, will be beyond the reach and compass of the art-critical, in all time to come. It is precisely this which is the stumbling-stone and rock of offence to so many of the German critics who have repeatedly, but in vain, assailed the citadel of the Keep in which his donjoned horde of treasure-spoil, accumulated from the thirty-six compass-points of the ocean of knowledge, lies stored; for Paul is the Drake of his age in literary discovery and adventure: he has visited regions, till his time unknown (save by hearsay): ransacked the gold-coasts of the Orbis super-terrestris: taken wing to the fabulous regions of lands traditionally older than "Grandmama Chaos ;" and returned laden with the riches of his research,

"As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faery
Earning bright spoil for her enchanted dome."

What marvel, then, that there should be found those who were jealous of his incomprehensible glory, in his own day, when, as was happily described by one who was amongst the first-if not the very first Englishman-to announce to the people of this country the existence of the man, that "the

eulogist of Jean Paul commonly qualifies his praise by the confession that he does not understand him."*

Both Goethe and Schiller fell foul of him in the "Xenien," but covertly enough: and even to this day he is no favourite with their degenerate successors, whose gravity is so cumbersome at times, that they cannot throw it off upon occasion; even Gervinus is hard upon him; but the unkindest cut of all is from the sausage-slicing Schlosser, who seems to have about as good a notion of humour as an oyster in hysterics, and denies him a niche in his two-volumed temple of worthies of the "Eighteenth Century!"

The whole minnow-fry of letterlings treat him with scarcely more consideration: but these have their excuse in their real want of understanding; their eyes crack with straining after the great sun that scintillates only to their sight; like Atys on the tossing ocean, they stand shivering in their forlorn nakedness, and buffet the empty air with insane amazement, whilst they shout in a voice of wonderment,

"Ubinam quibusve in locis te positum ?"

Notwithstanding this, the "whirligig of Time," slow yet sure, to" bring about its revenges over the memories of the departed Great, has for some years past been seeking for the true meridian in which to fix the dial-plate denoting the hour of Richter's resurrection; and not unlikely will our land be fixed on as the spot selected for its site. "In the moral desert of vulgar literature (wrote Mr. Carlyle, anno 1827, in the faith of a true believer), with its sandy wastes, and parched, bitter, and too often poisonous shrubs, the writings of this man will rise in their irregular luxuriance, like a cluster of date trees, with its green sward and well of water, to refresh the pilgrim in the sultry solitude, with nourishment and shade."

True prophecy of genius! not for his own age and people is the charmer's power of utterance, when his charm is too wisely spoken! deaf adders are the multitude, who listen as though they hear but understand not! They weigh the wisdom of a

*The passage occurs in the preface to a little work, the production of one Heine, who wrote under the pseudonym of "Anton Wall." The name of this book was "Amatonda," and an English translation of it appeared anonymously in the year 1811. The translator tells us that one of the characters in this Fairy Tale (Selim) was expressly sketched for a portrait of Jean Paul, by the author (according to his own confession of the fact). It is altogether a pleasant trifle; but there are a few extracts at the end of the tale, from the "Gems of Paul," volunteered as a freeoffering to the reader, worth all the rest of the book (excepting the preface), to our fancy. "Amatonda" may serve as an instance of the sort of unwilling homage exacted by Paul from the book-wrights and critics of his day. The little tale is a

model for translators.

Sage in scales that cannot mount, for the counterpoise of their judgment is as a volume of vapour that dissipates itself in the balance, and is found wanting. The far-off strains, loud echoing as "over some wide-watered shore" in the unaccustomed harmonies of a sublime outpouring pathos, are to these but as the drowsy tinklings of a bell-wether, or the hollow dirge-note of an empty conch-full of sound, but senseless to all, save the gifted!-for, none but the Poet can interpret the voices of Nature; only the inspired can catch the strains that float

"Murmuring from Glenamara's inmost cave!"

That Richter has his shortcomings, who can deny? and yet the sum of these is by no means momentous. If we were forced to the confession of what, in our own judgment, constitutes his principal failing, without hesitation we would affirm it to be found in his want of discipline. True, his genius is altogether of the mosaic order, and its products marvellously chequered; but still there is an absence, too frequently, of that congruous disposition of the parts, without which the whole resembles rather an intellectual Sphinx, a monster riddle of labyrinthine structure, which must be first half buried in the desert-sand of Time, ere its real dimension can be made apparent to the beholder. His works have an aspect of Babel about them, and that not so much for want of plan, as because there is scarcely one amongst them having a finished appearance. Accident alone often seems to have suggested the design which some other accident has interrupted before completion. A great work, perfect and entire, is wanting to crown the monument of his fame. The "Titan" is the nearest approach to this: though it may be doubted whether the bulk of the work, which, in some measure, answers to its appellative, has not earned it this preference over the rest. His plastic powers were perpetually overstrained to forge the grotesque vizard of some brain-phantom of the fleeting moment. His wondrous powers of fancy were the constant intruders into the province of his sober reason: his tenacious memory prompted him to an endless indulgence in all sorts of analogical bizarreries. He sought in all things for types and parallels, and when he found them not, he cast about for contrasts instead.

The very fabric of his feelings is fashioned of a shot-coloured substance, and its hues are reflected as are those of the chameleon-according to the light they are viewed in; and like the chameleon, too, he launches his pen at a simile with