unexampled popularity by his original and daring tragedy of Götz von Berlichingen,' published in 1773. In 1774 he gained a European celebrity by the Sorrows of Werter;' and he had already rendered himself an object of admiration to the young, and of terror to the timid, by the publication of several pungent satirical writings, when his good genius guided to the vicinity of Frankfort the young Duke of Saxe Weimar, who was about to assume the government on coming of age. In accepting the friendship, and taking up his residence at the court of this prince, Goethe entered on an unvarying career of prosperity. For a few years the young Duke and his friend led a life of gaiety, of which there are many curious anecdotes current in Germany; but, during a joyous and somewhat wild life, the intellectual singularly prevailed over the sensual. Even during that course of dissipation, the most important of Goethe's works were commenced, though none of them were published until after his return from Italy. That country he visited in 1786, and to the time which he spent in it he ever after recurred with delight. Though Shakspeare was the individual poet he most prized, and Greek the literature which he held up as the rule of all excellence, Italy was the land of his affections. He remained two winters in Rome. Here he cultivated the studies of archaiology and the fine arts, which he had begun to practise in his youth, but now abandoned for poetry and the study of nature.

To these pursuits, on his return to Germany, he applied as the chief business of his life; and the insignificance of the patron as a sovereign tended to render the poet more conspicuous, and to increase his power over the minds of the Germans. The Duke was a general in the Prussian service, and, as a minor power, followed the course of policy pursued by the head of his house, the Elector of Saxony. He could not indulge in ambition, and spent his small revenue more like a private nobleman than a sovereign prince. He was desirous to collect a library for the use of himself and the inhabitants of Weimar. He had mines on one portion of his small territory. With the other Dukes of Saxony he was jointly the possessor of a university, Jena. He wished to found a school of drawing; and the creation of a German theatre, and the collecting eminent men of all kinds at Weimar and Jena, were the especial objects of his ambition. In all these things Goethe was the right-hand to execute, if his, in fact, was not the mind to design. In the matters which most governments make their prime concern, such as finances, military affairs, and courts of justice, Goethe had certainly no inclination to take any part; he was what, in France, would be called a minister of public instruction. Scarcely was he

settled in his new office when the French Revolution broke out. This led to one famous exception to the life he was pursuing. He has recorded it in the volume of his Memoirs,' relating his participation in the too famous campaign of 1792, when he, as a non-combatant, accompanied the Duke of Saxe Weimar, who served under the Duke of Brunswick in his famous march which did not reach to Paris. The early retirement of Prussia from the league against France restored peace to the North of Germany, and Goethe was at liberty to return to his favourite pursuits. In the prosecution of these he had the happiness soon to connect himself with Schiller, a man ten years younger than himself, of a genius totally opposite to his own, and therefore perhaps best adapted to act in concert with him.

Goethe has, with delightful frankness, related how, exceedingly disliking the Robbers,' Schiller's first, worst, and most famous play, and feeling a strong aversion towards the Kantian philosophy, to which Schiller was attached, he had conceived an antipathy towards the offending poet, whom he resolutely shunned. But having once met, the passionate zeal of Schiller in pursuit of their common objects was irresistible. Dislike subsided into tolerance, and was at last converted into warm admiration and love. Memorable consequences followed from their union, and their literary correspondence remains an instructive example of what may be effected by the collision of powerful minds of opposite character. Schiller died in 1804. During the time allotted to their joint exertions, Goethe produced many of his greatest works, and Schiller all the best of his. During the same period, Goethe pursued his philosophical studies with the eminent men who then filled professors' chairs at Jena. The metaphysical systems of Fichte, and afterwards of Schelling, which succeeded that of Kant, met with some favour in his eyes. At least, though he kept aloof from the controversies of the day, he laboured to connect with philosophical speculations his own particular studies in various branches of natural history and science.

It was after Schiller's death, and when Goethe was approaching his sixtieth year, that the storm of war unexpectedly burst upon Weimar and Jena. He did not leave Weimar; but aware of the peril to which he with every one was exposed, on the very day of the battle of Jena, the 14th of October, 1806, he married a lady with whom he had lived for many years, and at the same time legitimated his only child, a son. During the short period of extreme degradation into which Prussia and Saxony sunk, from 1806 till the fall of Bonaparte in 1813, he withdrew, as much as possible, from political life;

he would not suffer newspapers to be brought him, or politics to be discussed in his presence, but fled to the arts and sciences as an asylum against the miserable realities of life. Such had always been his practice. He has said of himself that he never had a disease of the mind which he did not cure by turning it into a poem. In his early youth, having lost a mistress through foolish petulance of temper, he, as a penance, made his own folly the subject of a comedy. And, in after life, while Europe was convulsed, he was absorbed in studies independent of the incidents of the day. Thus varying his pursuits, he kept on his serene course with no other interruptions than such as inevitably befall those who attain old age. It was his lot to survive the associates of his youth. In 1827, he lost his early friend, from whom he had never been estranged, the Grand Duke of Weimar. In 1830, he met with a severer privation, in the death of his son at Rome. It was feared that this calamity would prove fatal to Goethe, whose strength was sensibly declining; but he survived the blow, and enjoyed the best consolation which could be afforded to him in the exemplary care of his amiable and gifted daughter-in-law, and in his two young grand-children, to whom he was tenderly attached. His last years were spent in cheerful retirement. He possessed an elegant and spacious house in Weimar, but he also had a cottage in the park, where he dwelt alone, receiving his friends tête-à-tête; and, on particular occasions, going into the town to entertain company. He retained his faculties to the last, and made a very precise disposition of his property. His extensive collections in natural history and art were directed to be preserved as a museum for twenty years. These were among the objects of his latest solicitude. He died March 24, 1832, in the eighty-third year of his age.

Goethe's figure was commanding, and his countenance severely handsome. He appears to have acquired a great ascendency over his fellow-students at the universities, and to have kept the professors in awe. In after life he was reproached by Bürger and others with haughtiness, and was accused of making his inferiors in station and in genius too sensible of their inferiority; but his powers of captivation were irresistible when he pleased to exert them. His social talents were of the highest order. Such was Goethe for his own generation and country. To posterity he will live chiefly as a poet. Of his most remarkable works we will now speak, not chronologically, but according to the classes which are recognised by systematic writers.

In epic poetry, his pretensions will be derided by those who adhere to the theory of M. Bossu, adopted by Pope. According to this, the

common opinion, the Epos' requires supernatural machinery, illustrious actors, and heroic incident. The German critics, on the contrary, maintain that the essential character of the Homeric poetry lies in the epic style, not in the subject of the narrative; a style analogous to that of Herodotus, whom they place at the head of the epic historians, and to be found in a very large proportion of our own ancient ballads, such as relate to Robin Hood, Chevy Chase, &c. Goethe on this idea began a continuation of the Iliad in his Achilleis,' and he threw the graces of his own style over the old epic fable of Reynard the Fox.' But it was in Herman and Dorothea' that he displayed all his powers: this is both a patriotic and domestic tale; the characters in humble life; the incident, a flight over the Rhine on the invasion of the French. It abounds in maxims of moral wisdom, and in pathos; but it is too national to bear translating.

It is as a lyric poet that Goethe is popular in the fullest sense of the word, and may challenge comparison with the greatest masters of all ages. In the song, he abounds in master-pieces, passionate and gay. His elegy has sometimes the erotic character of Propertius, (as in the famous Roman Elegies,') and sometimes emulates the refinement and purity of Petrarch: his ballads are as wild and tender as any that Spain or Scotland have produced. His very numerous epigrams bear more resemblance to the Greek Anthology than to the pointed style of the Latin writers. Besides these he has produced a number of allegorical and enigmatical poems on art and philosophy, which cannot be placed under any known class.

Goethe's dramatic works are about twenty in number. There is this peculiarity in his career as a dramatic poet, that though the drama is essentially the most popular branch of poetry, he never wrote for the people; his plays are all experiments, and no two resemble each other. He seems to have been unaffectedly indifferent to their reception on the stage. His first juvenile play, Götz von Berlichingen,' was in prose, and unlike any thing that had appeared on the German boards. It exhibited, in a strong light, the manners of the Germans at a romantic period when the petty barons and knights were a sort of privileged freebooters, sometimes generously resisting the oppressions of the emperor and the higher nobility, and sometimes plundering the citizens of the free towns. The style was in harmony with the subject, daring in its originality, and all but licentious in its freedom. By audiences accustomed only to pedantic imitations of the French, it was received with tumultuous applause; but the admiration of the more cultivated classes was given to the Iphigenia in Tauris,' an