Charles William Ramler was born in 1725 at Colberg in Pomerania, of needy parents, and received his early education at the orphan schoo! of Stettin. He became Professor of Logic and Fine Literature in the Berlin Academy for cadets, which office and his various literary exertions maintained him comfortably till 1787, when he obtained a pension, a seat in the Academy, and a share in the direction of the National Theatre. He died in 1798, of pulmonary consumption, after having withdrawn from his employments for some time before from ill health. His poems, consisting chiefly of odes, in the manner of Horace, obtained great popularity. They were first collected apart in 1772. Taylor observes that, though the lyric works of Ramler might be objected to by a severe critic, as having too much the character of imitations, yet while Lessing passed for an Aristotle, Mendelsohn for a Plato, and Gleim for an Anacreon,— and all of those were friends of his,-to him the epithet of the German Horace was applied with less hyperbole.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born at Kamenz in Pomerania, in January, 1729; was the son of a clergyman (himself a voluminous writer) and the eldest of twelve children. He died at Hamburg, Feb. 15, 1781, after a life of many changes, and various literary employments, having received the appointment of Librarian at Wolfenbüttel, in 1769, from the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick. His poetry consists of Epigrams, Minor poems, Fables, and Plays, of which Nathan the Wise, an argumentative drama, has been most celebrated, and, as curtailed by Schiller, became a favorite acting play throughout Germany. He appears, however, to have been far greater as a critic and polemic than as a poet, and wrote in an admirably clear style, and with considerable power of thought and erudition, on religion, philosophy, literature, and art. A writer in the Gent.'s Mag. of May, 1846, contrasting him with Voltaire, after speaking of his close rigid logic, and eminently philosophical mind, affirms that "the love of truth, not the love of fame, was the active spring, the vital principle, of his intellectual activity."

Lessing is an author admired and extolled by men who have evidently no taste for German literature in its peculiar character, although it has lately been said, in an able article on Lessing, in the Edinburgh Review (No. 166), that he "first gave to German literature its national tendencies and physiognomy;" that while Klopstock made it English, Wieland French, Lessing made it German. This remark rests, I think, upon no very solid grounds, at least as to Lessing's priority; for was not Klopstock, in all his attempts at rivalling the great English Epic,-with his cumulated ornaments and multitudinous imagery-" festoons of angels singing at every soar of the interminable ascension"--thoroughly Teutonic-and Wieland's Muse, even according to his own account, Ger

manized Italian rather than French? That some French poets endea vored, like him, to turn their strains on Classic and on Italian models, is but a limited ground of resemblance. The Wallenstein of Schiller, and the finest parts of Goethe's Faust, are perhaps more like English poetry of the first order, and have less unlikeness to it, than any other products of the German Muse; and for this reason that they are the best German poetry; and that, as the most beautiful forms and faces of all nations are alike in their predominant characteristics, so the finest and purest poetry of every nation has more in it which is common to all nations, and less of mere national feature than the inferior kinds. But perhaps a national cast of thought is more to be discerned in prose writers than in poets. The style of Lessing is too good and pure to be eminently national.

The "compeers" of the four writers above-mentioned were Hagedorn, Schlegel, Ebert, Kramer, Gleim, Kleit, and others. Wieland, Herder, and Bürger, more celebrated than those last named, came upon the field before they had all retired from it. S. C.

Note I., p. 312.

The characteristics of German intellect Mr. Coleridge has given in The Friend (vol. iii., pp. 69-73. Essay I. 4th edit.). "If I take the three great countries of Europe," he says, "in respect of intellectual character, I should characterize them in the following way :-premising only that in the first line of the first two tables I mean to imply that genius, rare in all countries, is equal in both of these, the instances equally numerous; not, therefore, contra-distinguishing either from the other, but both from the third country:

So again with regard to the forms and effects, in which the qualities manifest themselves intellectually :

Of "idea or law anticipated" he remarks, that "this, as co-ordinate with genius, applies likewise to the few only, and, conjoined with the

two following qualities, includes or supposes, as its consequences and accompaniments, speculations, system, method, &c." He represents the mind of the three countries as bearing the following relations to time:

GERMANY.

Past and Future,

ENGLAND.

Past and Present.

FRANCE.
The Present.

"The parent vice of German Literature," says the article on Lessing referred to in the last note, "is want of distinct purpose; and, as consequences of this, want of masculine character and chastened style." Hence, according to the reviewer, its "manifest inferiority" to our own. Others, on the contrary, consider it a special merit in German literature that it does not attempt, or at least hold it necessary, to comprehend its whole purpose beforehand; that it has for its object to enlarge the domain of revealed truth and knowledge, the entire fruits of the discovery in these particulars being left for time to disclose. It is a besetting evil of English literature that scarcely anything is produced here, the want of which is not felt and declared before it makes its appearance. The vice of the English mind, in the present age, as many feel, is its pseudopracticality everything treated of must issue in something to be done forthwith and outwardly, to be enjoyed sensuously or sentimentally. The Germans write on a different principle, or from a different impulse ; they are not such slaves to the comforts of life as we are, and consequently care more for pure intellectual activity; can better afford to say with Bacon: opera ipsa pluris facienda sunt, quatenus sunt veritatis pignora, quam propter vitæ commoda. They write far more than we do, in a free spirit of enterprise, that takes no bond beforehand, but carries on the adventurer with hopes the larger because undefined, and very slight fears of censure or contempt. They go exploring in all directions; and though doubtless in many directions nothing is to be found but barrenness, though many of the travellers are not furnished with the powers and means necessary for drawing any advantage from such expeditions, though most of them are too little restrained by spiritual habits of awe and reverence; yet, can it be doubted that, acting in this spirit, they have made discoveries in fruitful regions, while the English have been making none? have been marching with a pompous measured gait along beaten tracks, and, what is more to be contemned, maintaining that by the old roads men may reach new places, the need of arriving at which they cannot but feel, even while they declaim against the presumption of travelling otherwise than as our fathers travelled before us; for instance, that by the old doctrine of Inspiration (the verbal doctrine) we can harmonize the new views of Holy Writ which present themselves to advancing thought and a development of mind as necessary and

natural as that roses should blow in the summer season. The divinity of Scripture is a truth which no intellectual error can throw into total darkness, because it shines with light reflected from the very heart and moral being; but men obscure and dishonor it by persisting in presenting it under the form which it seemed to wear in the twilight of reflection, even while a stronger day is revealing its true lineaments more clearly.

Let us judge the "worthy Teutones" as thinkers and writers, not by the quantity of their chaff, but by the quantity of their grain; the good grain which already enters into our own loaf. Much that is German may be found in the thoughts of our most marked writers, even those that are fighting against what they call Germanism. But no sooner do we abstract the solid matter from the mass of the unsound that floats around it, than we forget whence it came. When it is found to be Catholic, it is no longer admitted to be Teutonic, and unless it is hollow and visionary it is not recognised as German.

Who can wonder that one who sees a "manifest inferiority" in German literature to English literature of the same period-(if our literature of past ages is meant to be included, the comparison is hardly fair)— should ascribe this inferiority to a "want of culture" in the producers! I however conjecture that a systematic education of the intellect is more general in Germany than here. Germans are taught to think-Englishmen to read and write; there are very fine specimens of style in German literature; and if German authors, as a body, write worse than the English, I believe it is because they think more, and have a greater number of new thoughts to provide with new apparel. The streams of language run less smoothly when they are flowing through freshlyopened channels. I will conclude this note with referring the reader to an interesting little essay, in the form of comments upon a saying of Mr. Coleridge, on the advantages which the Germans owe to their philosophical education, to their "being better trained and disciplined" than ourselves" in the principles and method of knowledge." It is in the Guesses at Truth, pp. 244-9, 2d edit. S. C.

Note J., p. 318.

Tait's Magazine, Jan., 1835, p. 9.

"These are things too unnatural to be easily believed; or, in a land where the force of partisanship is less, to be easily understood. Being true, however, they ought not to be forgotten: and at present it is almost necessary that they should be stated, for the justification of Coleridge. Too much has been written upon this part of his life, and too many reproaches thrown out upon his levity and want of principle in his supposed sacrifice of his early political connexions, to make it possible for

out a

any reverencer of Coleridge's memory to pass over the case full explanation. That explanation is involved in the strange and scan dalous conduct of the Parliamentary Whigs. Coleridge passed over to the Tories only in that sense in which all patriots did so at that time, and in relation to our great foreign interest-viz, by refusing to accompany he Whigs in their almost perfidious demeanor towards Napoleon Buonapart ›. Anti-ministerial they affect to style their policy, but in the most eminent sense, it was anti-national. It was thus far-viz. exclusively, or almost exclusively, in relation to our great feud with Napoleon-that Coleridge adhered to the Tories. But because this feud was so capital and so earth-shaking a quarrel, that it occupied all hearts, and all the councils of Christendom, suffering no other question almost to live in its neighborhood, hence it happened that he, who acceded to the Tories in this one chapter of their policy, was regarded as an ally in the most general sense. Domestic politics were then, in fact, forgotten: no question, in any proper sense a Tory one, ever arose in that era: or, if it had, the public attention would not have settled upon it, and it would speedily have been dismissed."

Ib., October, 1834, pp. 593-4.

"From Malta, on his return homewards, he went to Rome and Naples. One of the Cardinals, he tells us, warned him, by the Pope's wish, of some plot, set on foot by Buonaparte, for seizing him as an anti-Gallican writer. This statement was ridiculed by the anonymous assailant in Blackwood, as the very consummation of moon-struck vanity; and it is there compared to John Dennis's phrensy in retreating from the sea-coast, under the belief that Louis XIV. had commissioned emissaries to land on the English shore and make a dash at his person. But, after all, the thing is not so entirely improbable. For it is certain that some orator of the Opposition (Charles Fox, as Coleridge asserts) had pointed out all the principal writers in the Morning Post, to Napoleon's vengeance, by describing the war as a war "of that journal's creation." And as to the insinuation that Napoleon was above throwing his regards upon a simple writer of political essays, that is not only abundantly confuted by many scores of analogous cases, but also is specially put down by a case circumstantially recorded in the second tour to Paris, by the celebrated John Scott. It there appears, that on no other ground whatever, than that of his connexion with the London newspaper press, some friend of Mr. Scott's had been courted most assiduously by Napoleon during the hundred days. Assuredly, Coleridge deserved beyond all other men that ever were connected with the daily press, to be regarded with distinction. Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be disen.