played by Mathews, and in which the knowledge of Obadiah's presence would inevitably stimulate that keen observer to frisk with peculiar and merciless pleasantry. The biography is, on the whole, a clever book, containing many amusing anecdotes, and well calculated to revive and retain the memory of a remarkably gifted performer. As the present two volumes bring the narrative only to the beginning of those popular performances, the "At Homes," or recitations, in which Mathews was the sole exhibitor, there must be much remaining to tell, and well worthy of being told. The actor's intercourse with individuals of rank, as well as of public name, his long and various mixture with human character under all circumstances, and the quick sensibility to the ludicrous, the forcible, and the original, in human nature, gave him boundless opportunities of sustaining the office of a mental Lavater. Certainly no man better understood the physiognomy of the mind; and, professional as his remarks naturally must be, they often had a value beyond the theatre. To this native sagacity he added the merit of estimable personal conduct. Mathews sought none of the infamous celebrity which men, who presume themselves geniuses, are so fond of acquiring. He did not find it essential to his fame either to separate from his wife, or cast off his son; and he died, as he had lived, without a stain on his name. A DISCOURSE ON GOETHE AND THE GERMANS. How glad I am, my dear Mr North, to have found you at home!-charming snuggery!-famous fire!-and I declare there's a second tumbler on the table, as if you expected me. Your health, my dear friend!—good heavens, what intense Glenlivat! I must add a little water; and now, that at last we are cozy and comfortable-feet on fender, glass in hand — I beg to say a few words to you on the subject of German morals and German literature. Sir, unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I must crave your indulgence -more sugar, did you say?while I dilate a little upon the many trumpet-blowings and drum-beatings we have heard on these two subjects for the last fifteen or twenty years. Morals!-oh the good, honest, simple, primitive, Germans! Literature! oh the deep-thinking, learned, grand, original-minded Germans! Now, the fact is, sir, that the Germans have neither morals nor literature. But, as I intend, with your permissionyour bland countenance shows your acquiescence to demonstrate by the thing they call literature, the notion they entertain of the thing they call morals, I need not trouble you with a double disquisition on these two points, as in fact they are, like the French Republic, one and indivisible. Fifty years ago, they themselves con The fess, they had no literature. capabilities of their noble language were yet undiscovered; their scholars wrote in Latin; their wits wrote in French. Poetry was defunct, or rather uncreated; for, on the top of the German Parnassus, such as it was, sat in smoke and grandeur the weakest of mortals, the poorest of versifiers, the most miserable of pedants, John Christoph Gottshed. Was he kicked down from his proud eminence by the indignation of his countrymen ?— hooted to death by their derision ?and finally hung in chains as a terror to evil doers? My dear sir, the man was almost worshipped-yes-he, this awful example of human fatuity -a decoction of Hayley and Nathan Drake-was looked up to by the whole German nation, as an honour to the human race. It will not do for them to deny the soft impeachment now, and tell us that they look down upon that worthy. I dare say they do; but whom do they look up to between the days of Gottshed, and the first appearances of a better order of things in the persons of Wieland, Klopstock, and Gesner? To the other members of the Leipsic school, Gellert, Rabener, and Zacharia pretty men for a nation to be proud of!-No sir, you need not shake your head. I am not in a passion, I assure you, but only a little nettled; for can any thing be more provoking than to have one's ears tormented incessantly with praises of every thing German, by a set of blockheads, male and female, who know nothing of the subject, and take all that the Germans themselves advance for gospel? Depend upon it, sir, hundreds of young ladies can repeat stanzas of Gleim and Utss, who never read a line of Spencer in their lives. So let us go back to Gottshed. Did you ever meet with his collection of plays called the German Theatre ? A lucky man if you haven't, for such a load of trash was never before brought together in one heap since the days of Augeus. Translation, or more properly, as they themselves call it, "oversetting," is the loftiest of their flights. And such translations! Corneille, Racine, Germanized, and by the hand of John Christoph himself; hand more fit to stuff sausages than translate the Cid or Iphiginie. And even in this cabbaging and pilfering how limited was their range! The Danish and French seem to be the only tongues they had the command of. English was a fountain sealed, and a well shut up from them, till some French depredator had first melted the wax and picked the padlock. But, gracious heaven, Mr North, how they dirtied the water! And who was it, after all, whom they translated or imitated? Not Johnson-not Shakspeare-nor even glorious John. Who then? Addison! —The Drummer, which even in English is a wonderfully stupid performance for the creator of Sir Roger de Coverly, is tortured into more Teutonic dulness in a close translation; and Gottshed founds his claim to supremacy as an original author on his tragedy of Cato. Stars and Garters! bob-wigs and shoe-buckles! what a Cato! Addison's is poor enough, and spouts like a village schoolmaster in his fifth tumbler; and virtuous Marcia towers above her sex like a matron of the Penitentiary; but Gottshed's Cato is a cut above all this. Shall I give you the Dramatis Per. sona? Here they are in my note-book. "CATO. ARSENE or PORCIA. What do you think of that, sir? And what do you think of Arsene who has been brought up by Arsaces, and by him been made Queen of the Parthians, turning out in the third act to be Cato's daughter, and shockingly in love with Cæsar? Think of all this, sir, and of the prodigious orations between the two heroes in rhyming Alexandrines, and you will rejoice as I did that the long-winded old patriot put himself to death. It is the only consolation one has all through the play to know that in the fifth act justice will be executed on all and sundry; for Gottshed does not spare an inch of the cold steel. But why do I lay such stress on poor old buried and forgotten John Christoph?-I'll trouble you for the kettle. The reason is very plain; I want to find out some excuse for the Germans having formed such an exaggerated estimate of their present school-and I think I have found it in the profundity of the abyss they were sunk in before it made its appearance. People in a coal-pit see the smaller stars at mid day as plain as if each of them were of the first magnitude. The deeper they go down, the brighter shines the twinkler; so that when the Leipsic public had fallen into the depths of Gottshedism, no wonder that, on the first rising of Wieland, they considered him the sun in heaven. Then shone Klopstock, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe forming-as seen from that subterranean level-a whole planetary system. But for us English, sir, to look up to such lights-to talk of them in the same century with our own-orto think they are fitted to be classed with those glorious constellations that illumine the British sky, and shed their glory over all lands-the thing is beyond joke 'tis monstrous. Contrast them,Klopstock-Milton; Schiller-Shakspeare; Lessing-Dryden; Goethe— Walter Scott; and as to their small fry, Sam Johnson would have swal lowed them all.-Let me turn'the cock, sir; I admire your hospitable plan of the cask and spigot, it saves so much trouble in drawing corks-is the water boiling? So let us hear no more talk of the vast treasures of German literature. There are not six of them authors worth reading, in what is properly called literature. Learning and antiquities I leave out of the questionthey are industrious moles, and grub excellently well-and yet it will take many millions of moles to make a Bentley. In history they have but one name worth mentioning-John Von Müller-and he is one of the sons of Anak, and will sit in the opposite scale to Gibbon, and move not an inch towards the beam-their tribe of gentlemen who write with ease-their story-tellers, romancers, parlour poets, and so forth, are utterly below contempt. Our annual bards and authors are worth them all put together; and as to our novelists, properly so called, taking them as painters of life and manners, who would think of comparing our second, third, or even our fourthrates with the miserable Tromlitsses and Van der Veldes, or Hauffs and Spindlers, who rule the roast in their own country, and tempt good-natured young lords to introduce them here? Did any human being ever succeed in getting to the end of a German novel of ordinary life, without a weariness of the flesh that suggested indistinct thoughts of suicide? Not one: I have tried it a hundred times-and this is what I have been aiming at-their books, my dear sir, are not only stupid but disgusting-I have met with very few that were not positively shocking from the insight they gave me into the depravity of a whole people. The French, heaven knows, are bad enough; but with them it is a paroxysm, a fever of impropriety, that is limited to a certain set and will pass. Besides, the French abominations are intended to be abominable; an unnatural state of manners is chosen as the subject of representation, and accordingly it is treated in as unnatural a way as possible. For the horrors and iniquities, of a kind that shock and disgust us so much in their performances, are limited to the romantic school-the insane men of perverted genius, like Victor Hugo, who, instead of exhausting old worlds and then imagining new, begin the process by imagining a new world, and peopling it with the creations of their distempered fancies. But nobody meets such things in the novels purporting to be stories of real life. Paul de Kock himself is a humorist, gross, coarse, and "improper," but he sets out with the intention of decribing gross, coarse, and improper people. There are thieves, drunkards, dissolute men, and naughty women, in all countries; we may wonder at people's taste in painting such manners and modes of thinking, but we are not to blame any one but the individual who chooses to bedaub his pallet with such colours. The Germans, on the other hand, are more revolting in their novels of common life than in their more ambitious imaginings. The light is let in upon us through chinks and crannies of the story, enabling us to see the horrible state of manners into which the whole nation is sunk; for observe, my dear sir, I don't allude to the scenes brought forward in their books to be looked at, shuddered at, and admired as pieces of sublime painting; what I mean is the unconscious air with which such revelations are made, the author seeing nothing strange in the incident he is describing; and talking of it as a matter perhaps of daily occurrence. And these are the people that have written and roared about themselves, till they have persuaded all Europe, or, at least, the rising generation in England, that they are an honest, and pure, and innocent people; simple in all their habits; and, in fact, only a better specimen of what was once the character of our Saxon ancestors. German integrity, German truth, are the constant parrot song of every national author. They have even made a substantive out of the word German; and with them Germanism or Deutscheit, means every virtue under heaven-modesty, I have no doubt, included. You nod, my dear sir, as if you approved of that -and in itself any thing that gives a strong national feeling, a pride in one's own country, a zeal to maintain its honour-is an admirable thing. I have not forgotten the thunders of applause that followed the clap-traps at our theatres about British courage -British power-hearts of oak, and things of that kind: admirable claptraps they were-but they had their effect, sir. There wasn't a god in the gallery that wouldn't have licked three Frenchmen the moment he had done clapping the aforesaid magnanimous declaration; for who would have cared a halfpenny for a million of Bonapartes after shouting in chorus, till their throats were dry, " Britons never, never, never will be slaves?" But the records of the last war will let us see the patriotism of the Germans. Every little principality and power seemed to run a race who should first truckle to the invader. The Confederation of the Rhine is a death-blow to their boasts; and, to go back to their literature, is their a single man among all their authors, except poor young Körner, that showed a spark of Tyrtæan fire? What said Goethe? He made the campaign against France in 1792, and wrote an account of it-are there any spirit-stirring appeals in it against oppression? Not a word but a great deal about the comfort of a blanket with which he kept himself warm on the march; and throughout the whole reign of Napoleon his muse was mute, or admitted to a place at court. And yet Thomas Carlyle, let me propose his health, sir, hip, hip, hurra!-almost worships that coldblooded, selfish, sensual old man; and this idolatry before such a shrine, the reputation of the Laird of Craigenput tock goes a great way to perpetuate. Such clouds of word praises, in which, I feel sure, the heart has no place, have been spread around this idol, that it positively needs a man to have very good eyes to see the paste and pasteboard it is composed of. Faust! Faust!-every human being, from about eighteen up to five-andtwenty, and some, even, who have come to years of discretion, have got into a perpetual sing-song of wonder and awe about the depth, grandeur, sublimity, and all the rest of it, of this inimitable performance. Did they ever think of extending their enumeration of its merits, so as to include its profanity, coarseness, vulgarity, and unintelligibleness? What are we to think of a work, sir, that, in the life-time of the author, needed commentaries on almost every passage, on its general scope and tendency, on its occult significations,-while, all the time, the author himself seemed to gape with as total an unconsciousness of its secret meanings as any one else, I will answer for it, at all `events, he would have found as much difficulty as either Carus, or Enk, or Duentzer, in explaining its "einheit and ganzheit," its oneness and allness. Read his own continuation of itnever was proof so complete of a man's ignorance of what he had meant in the former part of the work ;—that is to say, if you give him credit for having had any meaning in it at all. Recollect I don't deny that the man was clever. He was as clever a fellow as the world will often see; for, do you know, Mr North, I have a prodigious respect for the abilities of successful quacks. Success, itself, is the only proof I require. The less a priori grounds there were for expecting their triumphs, the greater credit they are entitled to. Therefore a bumper once more, if you please, sir, to the immortal Goethe. With no one element of the poetic character in his whole composition; without enthusiasm, without high sentiment,—with no great power of imagination, the man has persuaded his countrymen, and they have persuaded all Europe, that he was one of nature's denizens-the God-inspired in short, a Poet. Then, again, with no knowledge of life, abstracted from German life, without even the power of entering into a pure or lofty feeling, much less of giving birth to one, he has persuaded his countrymen that he was an imaginative lifedescriber, bareing the human soul, and tracing every thought to its parent source. Oh! paltry, foul, and most unnoble thoughts which Goethe had the power of tracing. Oh! fallen and sinful huraan soul which Goethe had the power to lay bare! No, no, my dear Mr North, there is but one light in which that old man purulant can be seen in the colours his countrymen have bedaubed him with. shrewd note-taker of their habits, as a relater of their every-day modes of thought, he is entitled to all the praise they give him,-but, oh German innocence!-oh pietas!-oh prisca fides !-what habits of life are thesewhat modes of thought! As a With the help of a first-rate style, full, clear, and satisfying, both to ear and understanding; and with a perfect mastery over the most flexible and graphic of all modern languages, it will be strange if, amidst all the unencumbered writings of this most laborious of the paper-stainers of his laborious and paper-staining country, "We lotte takes an early opportunity of informing her husband of various events which it is highly probable he was not altogether ignorant of. loved each other"-she says to him"when we were young, with all our hearts. We were separated;-you from me, because your father, out of an insatiable love of riches, married you to a wealthy old woman; I from you, because I had to give my hand, without any particular view, to a very respectable old man that I never loved. We were again free-you sooner than I was, your old lady leaving you a very handsome estate. I a little later, just when you returned from abroad. We met again-our recollections were delightful-we loved themthere was no impediment to our living together. You urged me to marry. I hesitated at first, because, though we are about the same age, I am older as a woman than you as a man. At last I could not refuse you what you considered your greatest happiness. You wished to refresh yourself at my side after all the troubles you had gone through in the court, the camp, and on your travels;-to recall your recollections-to enjoy life-but all, with me alone. I sent my only daughter to a boarding-school, where, indeed, she learns more than she could in the country; and not only her, but Ottilie also, my favourite niece, who would, perhaps, have been better as my assistant in household concerns under my own eye. All this was done with your perfect approval, solely that we might live to ourselves, and enjoy our long-wished and late-gained happiness undisturbed." some one or other may not be worthy of a sensible man's approbation. But, by heavens, sir! there is not one that has not something or other so revolt ing to all good taste as to destroy the pleasure you might otherwise have in the performance. And over all is spread such a dung-heap of vile sensualism and immorality, that you fear for the health of the surrounding inhabitants; for such nauseous exhalations must bear pestilence in every breath. There, sir, is a novel of his from which I intend to substantiate every one of these assertions, and, by way of keeping my assertions more easily in mind, I will reduce them to these:-Goethe is a coarse-minded sensualist, and the laxity of German manners is most revolting. The Wahlverwandtschaften, or, as it may be translated, the affinities of choice (as opposed to the affinities of blood), is a novel of common life. A certain baron, who is presented to us by no other name than Edward, in the prime of life (which other circumstances make us fix at about forty-three), rich, polished, and happy, is the hero of the tale. Married within a year to a certain Charlotte, and retired to his estate, no two people apparently can be happier. Building bowers, laying out plantations, and getting up duets on the flute and harpsichord, with books and other appliances, make time glide pleasantly enough; but, in an evil hour, Edward determines to have a spectator of his happiness, and launches out on the comfort they would derive from the society of an anonymous gentleman, who flourishes all through the book under the convenient designation of "The Captain." Charlotte, like a sensible woman, objects a little at first; probably as she is aware that all captains are dangerous inmates; and she has also some little regard for the morals of a young girl of the name of Ottilie, who is at present at school, but whom she intends to send for and make a sort of assistant housekeeper. You will observe, sir, both our friends -Baron Edward and the sensible Charlotte were no chickens, and had had considerable experience of the married life before. Like certain communicative personages on the stage, who generally relate the whole story of their lives, either to themselves or to some person who knows every incident as well as they do, Char Isn't this a charming mother, sir, and careful aunt?—Why, Mr North, you've filled up my tumbler without my seeing it!-you see how affectionate she is to her only daughter; how tenderly she talks of the respectable old man she could never love,-and what purity of mind there is in the whole description of the double wedding and double widowhood. But a bit of private history comes to light, a little after, viz., that the Captain and she had intended to hook Edward, the rich widower, into a marriage with the aforesaid Ottilie, Charlotte modestly supposing that she was now too old to attract his observation. Now, suppose Edward was two-and-twenty when he St Albansed himself; Charlotte mar |