Uhle. This "old Democratic gossip,' numerous adversaries condescend to call it, has often changed editors, and, as usual in successful papers, follows rather than directs public opinion. Still, it has strongly declared in favor of the Union, and as it has found great favor with thriving shopkeepers and sturdy farmers, we may take it as a symptom that the large middle class among the German settlers are unfavorable to the dis-ica prefer making war against one another to severing pretensions of the South. Two other daily periodicals published in the Empire City deserve to be mentioned-the Abend Zeitung and the Criminal Zeitung. The former hoists the Republican flag and pronounces in favor of speedy abolition; the second had for many years a communistic tint, and, though socialist to an extreme, never discovered in slavery anything higher than an "economical " question. It may be startling, but it is by no means strange, to discover that the men who, in Europe, affected to give to the right to labor the precedence over political liberty, concerned themselves in the American negroes only so far as their presence might influence the position of free workmen. as periodicals owe their influence merely to the private character and talent of the chief editor, and are altogether to be looked upon as private enterprises. Every political scheme, est fancy or the most absurd day-dream, finds every philosophical opinion, be it the wildits enthusiastic exponents in that numerous class; but the great, unfailing characteristic is the combativeness of the writers. True to their European habit, the Germans in Amer The West of the United States possessed, until very lately, an influential and well written paper, the Anzieger des Westens, published by M. (now Colonel) Börnstein, a political refugee, and M. Charles Bernays, once American Consul in Switzerland. This journal was so successful, and had enlisted among its staff so many correspondents of the highest standing (among others, Dr. Ruge, from Brighton), that the editors once offered a high price for the best German novel written in America. The competition was exciting and lively, and the prize was awarded by competent judges to M. Douai, the former editor of the San-Antonia Zeitung, whom the slaveholders had driven from Texas, and who is at present a contributor to one of the New York papers. The Americans were sccretly somewhat startled to hear that the Anzeiger had ceased to appear, in spite of its financial prosperity; having formerly been a Democrat, and converted by the war to the Republican creed, it seems that M. Börnstein found insuperable difficulties in maintaining his moral ground, and preferred to interrupt his journalistic labor. Another paper, the Westliche Post, started at St. Louis several years ago, as an opposition publication, has now entirely replaced its antagonist; it is of the true abolition hue, and carries the numerous Germans who inhabit the State of Missouri into the ultra Republican camp. Among the widely-circulated papers, we have to notice the Chicago Staats Zeitung, a Unionist journal, founded by Brentano, the former dictator of Baden. Most of the other a combined assault against the common evince a bitterness and a power of coarse inenemy, and in this ungrateful struggle they vective worthy of a better or a worse cause. Foremost, and almost alone on his unenviable pinnacle, stands M. Heinzein, of the ston Pioneer, the most radical, unsparing, indiscreet, and violent, but also the most deeply convinced of all German editors. He is wanting neither in cleverness nor conceitedness, and has, indeed, often brought his unwilling countrymen over to his ideas. In one of its recent issues, an English paper, the Missouri Republican, thus speaks of him : "When, a year or more ago, we took occasion to point out to the leaders of the radical German press that their course inevitably led to lashing them to the chariot wheel of the great Bugaboo, Carl Heinzen, at Boston, the olution in spe, there was quite an effort made self-proclaimed Danton of the prospected revdid us the justice to copy our article verbato make us appear ridiculous. Carl Heinzen tim in his Pioneer, and broadly hinted that we were about right in our estimate of the modern lansquenets of revolutionary young Germany; for, by some such name, he chose them worthy of a better title, though of some to stigmatize his compatriots, not deeming infinitely more degrading. "And what do we behold? Day after day, step by step, ever uncompromisingly and relentlessly did Heinzen proceed; now fulminating, then hectoring the world generally, but never failing to treat with unspeakable and his countrymen in America in particular, contempt his fellow-countrymen of the young of candor, of logic, tact, and foresight. He for their servility, their want was treated as a madman at times; again he was drawn into ridicule and contempt. Sometimes even a green specimen of late importaof inexorable logic," to be crushed; but German press tion entered the lists with him in the field all in vain." In fact, there has been erected in America a new stage for German literature but we feel bound to confess that the products are neither of the highest nor the purest kind, and that the performers are in nowise remarkable for the Atticism of their wit or the amiability of their temper. : From The Saturday Review. was without the best of intentions to impart are as wearisome to the reader as the author appears to think them incumbent upon himGERMAN authors seem gradually awaken- self. The reader should be now and then ing to the fact of the brevity of life, and to permitted to draw his own lessons, without the corresponding necessity of brevity in their having it flung in his teeth that he is a child monographs. They begin to perceive that, of the degraded and materialistic nineteenth in order to find readers, a writer must be tol- century. Moreover, a subject like the life of erably short and moderately readable; and Lessing claims an almost historic dignity of that the public is more frequently propitious treatment, and that " pitch of style" which to the successful digester than to the patient the late Dr. Arnold judged requisite in the accumulator of materials. There is scarcely composition of history. Not that M. Stahr a fact in Mr. Lewes' Life of Goethe which had not been previously mentioned in Viehoff's laborous work on the same subject; but even b German readers Mr. Lewes has made himself Goethe's biographer par excellence. A similar fate might have befallen the Life of Lessing, had a foreign author of reputation, till very recently, chosen to avail himself of the copious materials extant in the learned work of Guhrauer; but M. Adolf Stahr determined that a popular life of a writer who was the very incarnation of the German mind should at all events be attempted by one of his grateful compatriots. M. Stahr is one of the most prolific, and also one of the most entertaining, of living German writers. He is deeply enough read to satisfy the claims of his own nationality, but he has at the same time the vivacity of a Frenchman and the independent feelings of an Englishman. He appears to be one of those happily-constituted mortals who are at home everywhere. He has worshipped in If, however, the reader will consent to overthe museums of Rome and Florence, and con- look, or to estimate at its proper value, the versed at his case in Paris salons; he has occasionally almost oppressive grandeur of Aristotle under his pillow and Longinus at M. Stahr's commentative oratory, he will his fingers' ends; he is au fait with the secret find in this biography a very faithful picture, springs of Goethe's amours and the secret drawn by a most skilful hand, of an intelmeaning of the Music of the Future; he com- lectual life matchless for its vigor and truthmands the political situation in Germany and fulness. Lessing was restless, in the sense in the rest of Europe, and has encompassed in which the pilgrim, ever pressing onward and traversed the entire field of ethics, ancient to a goal it will never be given him to attain, and modern. He is a greater polyhistor than is restless. Those who complain of a want was Lessing himself; and his criticisms attempt as free and bold a range as those of the subject of this biography. That such a writer should but rarely be dull, is no matter for wonder; and it is perhaps equally natural that we should often miss in him the sobriety and moderation which becomes, a critic of the arch-critic. Constant allusions to the present * G. E. Lessing. Sein Leben und seine Werke. Von Adolf Stahr. 2 Bande. 2te Ausgabe. Berlin: 1862. of unity in his manifold expeditions on various fields but ill understand the unity of the true critic's life. Lessing was anything but a mere negative and destructive critic. Every literary advance which he made formed a link in that synthesis which, in a short life, he was able with unusual completeness to establish. In judging of works in the field of any art, it was his constant aim to establish the rules and the limits of that art. From a purification of the literary stables of Germany, he XIV., before publication, from the author's secretary, and by accident took it away with him from Berlin. The wrath of the philos opher, who declared himself robbed, was tre rose to distinct theories by which to deter- A peculiar bitterness characterizes Lesmine the adherence to, or aberration from, sing's unceasing attacks on Voltaire. It must fixed rules in the case of the French and Eng- be admitted that Voltaire suffered but little lish schools. In his Litteraturbriefe, he showed from them during his lifetimo, and that his how Shakspeare and the English dramatists reputation as an originator bids fair to last differ from the Greeks as species differ from as long in France as his fame as a destroyer; species, but how the French are as far from for in that country, even more than elsethem as the perversion is from the original, where, success and vanity form almost imand the false from the true. To the Eng-pregnable entrenchments. To this, probalish poets of Pope's time, and their host of bly, much of the bitterness of Lessing's aniimitators in the German didactic poets, he mosity may be ascribed; but M. Stahr sup had already assigned their true limits, exclud-plies another key, which may be taken for ing them from the Poetic Art. In his Ham- what it is worth. Lessing, it appears, had burger Dramaturgie, he more fully and spe- a personal opportunity of becoming acquainted cially exposed the radical vices of the French with the meanness and injustice of " Voltaire, tragedians, and defeated Voltaire, and his Chambellan du Roi," through certain more gods and worshippers, with their own weapon than questionable money transactions of the -the appliance of the rule of Aristotle. Yet latter, which involved him in a disgraceful he was not slow to perceive the likelihood of lawsuit, out of which he only escaped by an an aberration in a contrary direction, and to equally disgraceful compromise. His royal warn young Germany against that defiance patron and disciple founded on these transaoof all rules and laws which became the motto tions a comedy, entitled Tantale en Procès, and of their Sturm and Drang period, and of a mercilessly satirizing the avaricious philosomore recent French school. But to the Po-pher. Moreover, Lessing indiscreetly proetic Art itself, in contradiction to the Plastic, cured the MS. of Voltaire's Siècle de Louis he fixed limits, in his Laocoon, which Winckelmann himself, the greatest of German archæologists, had failed or refused to recognize. From Esthetics his genius took a loftier flight to Ethics, and after a long series of polemi-mendous. The secretary was dismissed, and cal encounters (some negative in their origin, but all constructive in their aim), arrived at its consummation in those speculations on the development of mankind, and the place belonging in it to revealed religion, which opened to him, in his own words, "an infinite view into a distance neither wholly hidden from his eyes nor wholly discovered to them by the soft gleam of sunset." His various polemical encounters were conducted, if not always with moderation (as in the case of Klotz), yet with a steady view to the goal which would be approached by the removal of the obstructions against which he revolted. Thus Lessing well deserves the name of a second Luther, not only for his fearlessness in overthrowing abuses, but because he did it for the sake of the truth whose countenance they hid from the sight of man. In either case, the vehemence of such struggles is to us rather melancholy than delightful, when we reflect on the hard fate of those who fight, not for fighting's sake, but to be enabled to pursue the path for whose end they are yearning. an interchange of disagreeable letters in French and Latin passed between Voltaire and Lessing. Lessing's letter has been lost, but he said "it was not one Voltaire was likely to stick in his window. The Frenchman's letter certainly repeats the accusation of theft against the secretary, but is otherwise flattering to Lessing. M. Stahr seems to us to attach too much importance to the affair, which only proves what every one knew before-that the temper of Voltaire was vinegar itself. The biographer-who, on a previous occasion, has started the theory that Goethe was a democrat at heart, and saw through the hollowness of courts and princes-is very anxious to prove Lessing a member, by anticipation, of the democratic party in Germany. He is candid enough to admit that his hero, except by occasional remarks, never mixed in the politics of the day, but consoles himself by observing that the reason of this was certainly not "that he lacked inclination or capacity for a literary activity of the sort.' The capacity all will admit, but of the in σε clination there is an utter want of evidence. | Spinoza (to whom M. Stahr compares him on Of the occasional remarks in question M. more than one occasion), was one of singular Stahr is not slow to make the most. Even a and unblemished purity, and furnishes anvery common-place poetical panegyric on other proof of the certain, but not very proFrederic II., contributed by Lessing in his found truth, that freedom of speculation is youth as a feuilletonist to a Berlin paper, is not, as some have ever been found to hold, forced into the argument. The poet says the beginning of immorality. His biographer that it would be a happiness to the king, observes (we hope we are not uncharitable in were his people already worthy of him," suspecting that we detect in the observation which is interpreted to mean, "in other the faintest possible tinge of regret) thatwords, if it could do without even so intelli"Lessing is the only one among the hegent (erleuchtet) a despotism." M. Stahr has roes of our classical literature, in whose also discovered a passage in which Lessing heart, love, full and great, found no entrance advocates the unity of Germany, though till the maturity of manhood. He was forty merely for the object of free trade between years old when he met, in Eva König, the the States. It would have been well to omit wife of his heart, and the story of his life up all fruitless speculation as to what Lessing to that time knows of no passion in any way "would have done" had he lived in the proved by evidence." times of "the great struggle against abso- M. Stahr, however, insists on the truth of lutism," and to confess at once, as the author the rumor that Lessing, as early as his nineafterwards docs, that Lessing's radicalism teenth year, entertained a passing passion for was only "theoretic." The biographer per- the actress Lorenz, and proceeds to make the ceives Schiller's motto, In tyrannos, visible, most of it. He has also discovered, even though unwritten, on the brow of Minna Von against his own judgment, possible evidence, Barnhelm; and quotes more direct evidence in a poem of eight lines, that his hero was from the fragmentary dramas, Spartacus and guilty of a "transitory error." His marHenzi, the hero of the latter of which is said riage, long delayed by money difficulties, to be none other than Lessing himself. Had took place in October, 1776, and cre sixteen Lessing felt it to be part of his mission to be months had passed, he was a broken-hearted a political reformer, he was not the man to widower, his beloved Eva having followed give any but a full and complete expression their first infant to the grave. "My wife is to the passionate longings within him. But dead," he wrote, "and this experience, too, he had to fight other battles, and with other I have made. I am glad that there cannot foes. The work of his life was to conquer be many such experiences remaining for me liberty of thought the one true lesson," to make." His studies were now to him, to in the words of a modern historian, "worth use his own expression, "laudanum ; " and learning from the Reformation," and the one with a weary heart he bore the burden of lesson Lessing had learnt from the history of the remaining three years of his existence. his country. Yet to those three years we owe Nathan and his Education of the Human Race. Such was the domestic life of this great manone year of happiness, and all the other years full of hope deferred, and of other trials for his own family was a source of anything but comfort to him. His public life may be simply described as a struggle for bare existence. He began it as little better than a literary hack; and ended it as the underpaid librarian of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick. The Elector Palatine generously promised him an annual pension for which he received devoted thanks, but of which his memory was never retentive enough to cause the payment of a single louis d'or. Such was the situation of the "theoretic re We had intended to make a few observations on Lessing's plays, whose poetical merits M. Stahr appears to us much to overrate. It is known that he himself wished them excluded from representation on the national stage he was working for; and it is evident that he wrote them, so to speak, more from a sense of duty, as practical examples, than from the instincts of creative genius. It has been remarked that his own inclinations lay rather towards the epos than to the drama-a tendency (barren except of one small but perfect fruit), which, it may be remembered, for a long time hampered Goethe's productive power. The private life of Lessing, like that of 1 publicans," the great German men of letters | exception of the German princes (against of Lessing's time. Klopstock lived on the whom M. Stahr has a parting fling for their pension of a foreign sovereign. Wieland refusal to contribute to Lessing's monuwas a ducal tutor, "probably more to the ment) has been more grateful, and, whether prince's advantage than his own," as Lessing it hails him as the genius of Revolution, wrote to him; and the latter was starved by with Gervinus, or of Evolution, with M. the bounty of two other native Mæcenases. Stahr willingly subscribes to the eloquent He died so poor that Duke Ferdinand was summing-up by the latter of his efforts in obliged to have him buried at the public ex- the search of truth:pense; but his munificence did not extend to the raising of a tombstone. The late Mr. De Quincey has compared the influence of Lessing on his contemporaries in Germany to that of Dr. Johnson on English literature. The comparison has very little point in it; but it would have been well for Lessing if, in a material sense, literature had been honored in him as it was in the person of the doctor. Posterity, with the "The reformer of our national poetry and literature, the creator of our prose, the founder of our stage, the legislator of our critical and aesthetical systems, superior in all their fields to all his contemporaries becomes the reformer of German philosophy begun by Luther, the founder of the historic and theology, the continuer of the great work view of religion, the great apostle of all true progress towards light in his century." IN Mr. Bentley's edition of "The Life and Letters of Washington Irving," edited by his nephew, Pierre M. Irving, there are some very important and interesting additions to the American text, one a thoroughly Washington-Irvingish description of his "cottage and his neices" on the banks of the Hudson, and its "roses and ivy from Melrose Abbey." It was written in February, 1846, during a short visit to Harley street-a welcome holiday snatched from his duties as American minister at Madrid, after he had tendered his resignation-to Mrs. Dawson, who was the Flora Foster of Flitwick, and whose sister, Emily Foster, now Mrs. Fuller, for whom he entertained at one time a warm attachment, furnishes to this volume seventy-nine pages of letters to herself, a diary, and recollections of friendly intercourse with Washington Irving. MESSRS. BOSWORTH AND HARRISON have just issued "The Book of Common Prayer," etc., newly arranged in the order in which it is appointed to be used, printed by the queen's printer, in 82mo., containing all the services, with the Rubrics, without omission or addition. In this edition the several parts of each service are printed in the order in which they are appointed to be used, by means of which a child or any person unfamiliar with the Prayer Book may readily find the places throughout the services. MESSES. LONGMAN & Co. announce an English dictionary, founded on Dr. Johnson's. The edition of 1773, the last edited by the author, is to form the substratum; Todd's additions are to be used; and all words of recent introduction, whether once obsolete or newly formed, are to find a place. It is to be published in quarto, in parts, the first to appear in the autumn. MESSRS. WILLIAMS AND NORGATE have in the press Mr. R. C. Carrington's "Observations of the Solar Spots," made at Redhill Observatory from 1853 to 1861; also, Dr. Cureton's "Ancient Syriac Documents relative to the Earliest Establishment of Christianity at Edessa," from the year after the Ascension to the fourth century. A MAP of Africa, to illustrate the discovery of the sources of the Nile by Captains Speke and Grant, and showing the route of these explorers, as well as the routes of other recent African travellers, has just been published by Mr. Wyld, of Charing Cross, Geographer to the Queen. DR. AUGUST KNOBEL, well-known for his many and zealous labors in the field of biblical litera ture, more especially his commentaries and historical investigations on the Old Testament, died a few days ago, at the age of fifty-seven, at Giessen. ENCORES.-The New York Philharmonic Society prints upon its programmes the following judicious rule upon this subject-"Encores cannot be permitted, as the programmes of the concerts are made out with reference to the time occupied by the various pieces, beyond which it does not seem desirable to extend the duration of the performance."-Reader. |