| <Frederick Schlegel>
| <Blackwoods 1843>
| <Blackie>
| <pb n="311">
| <q> </q>, said FICHTE one day at Berlin to 
| VARNHAGEN VON ENSE, or one of his friends, in his 
| own peculiar, cutting, commanding style ~~ <q> 
| </q>.  Some people, from pride, don't like to be 
| praised at all; and all sensible people, from 
| propriety, don't like to be praised 
| extravagantly:  whether from pride or from 
| propriety, or from a mixture of both, philosopher 
| Fichte seemed to have held in very small account 
| the patronage with which he was favoured at the 
| hands of the twin aesthetical dictators, the 
| Castor and Pollux of romantic criticism; and, 
| strange enough also, poet Goethe, who had worship 
| enough in his day, and is said to have been 
| somewhat fond of the homage, chimes in to the 
| same tune thus: <q>
| <pb "312">
| </q>
| That there is some truth in these severe remarks, 
| the paltry personal squibs in the 
| <hi rend="italic"> Leipzig Almanach </hi> for 1832, 
| which called them forth, with regard to Augustus 
| Schlegel at least, sufficiently show:  but there 
| is a general truth involved in them also, which 
| the worthy fraternity of us who, in this paper 
| age, wield the critical pen, would do well to 
| take seriously to heart; and it is this, that 
| great poets and philosophers have a natural 
| aversion as much to be praised and patronized, as 
| to be rated and railed at by great critics; and 
| very justly so.  For as a priest is a profane 
| person, who makes use of his sacred office mainly 
| to show his gods about, (so to speak,) that 
| people may stare at them, and worship him; so a 
| critic who forgets his inferior position in 
| reference to creative genius, so far as to assume 
| the air of legislation and dictatorship, when 
| explanation and commentary are the utmost he can 
| achieve, has himself only to blame, if, after his 
| noisy trumpet has blared itself out, he reaps 
| only ridicule from the really witty, and reproof 
| from the substantially wise.  Not that a true 
| philosopher or poet shrinks from, and does not 
| rather invite, true criticism.  The evil is not 
| in the deed, but in the manner of doing it.  
| Here, as in all moral matters, the tone of the 
| thing is the soul of the thing. And in this view, 
| the blame which Fichte and Goethe attach to the 
| Schlegels, amounts substantially to this, not 
| that in their critical vocation the romantic 
| brothers wanted either learning or judgment 
| generally, but that they were too ambitious, too 
| pretenceful, too dictatorial; that they must 
| needs talk on all subjects, and always as if they 
| were the masters and the lions, when they were 
| only the servants and the exhibitors; that they 
| made a serious business of that which is often 
| best done when it is done accidentally, 
| <reg orig="viz."> namely, </reg> discussion what our 
| neighbours are about, instead of doing something 
| ourselves; and that they attempted to raise up an 
| independent literary reputation, nay, and even to 
| found a new poetical school, upon mere criticism 
| ~~ an attempt which, with all due respect for 
| Aristarchus and the Alexandrians, is, and 
| remains, a literary impossibility.
| But was Frederick Schlegel merely a critic?  No!  
| He was a philosopher also, and not a vulgar one; 
| and herein lies the foundation of his fame.  His 
| criticism, also, was thoroughly and 
| characteristically a philosophical criticism; and 
| herein mainly, along with its vastness of 
| erudition and comprehensiveness of view, lies the 
| foundation of its fame.  To understand the 
| criticism thoroughly, one must first understand 
| the philosophy.  Will the unphilosophical English 
| reader have patience with us for a few minutes 
| while we endeavour to throw off a short sketch of 
| the philosophy of Frederick Schlegel?  If the 
| philosophical system of a transcendental German 
| and <hi rend="italic"> Viennese </hi> Romanist, 
| can have small intrinsic practical value to a 
| British Protestant, it may extrinsically be of 
| use even to him as putting into his hands the key 
| to one of the most intellectual, useful, and 
| popular books of modern times ~~ "The history of 
| ancient and modern literature, by Frederick Von 
| Schlegel;" ~~ a book, moreover, which is not 
| merely <q> </q>, as by one of themselves it has 
| been proudly designated, but has also, through 
| the classical translation of Mr Lockhart, been 
| made the peculiar property of English literature.
| In the first chapter of his <hi rend="italic"> 
| "Philosophie des Lebens," </hi> the Viennese 
| lecturer states very clearly the catholic and 
| comprehensive ground which all philosophy must 
| take that would save itself from dangerous error.  
| The philosopher must start from the complete
| <pb n="313">
| living totality of man, formed as he is, not of 
| flesh merely, a Falstaff ~~ or of spirit merely, 
| a Simon Pillarman and Total Abstinence Saint ~~ 
| but of both flesh and spirit, body and soul, in 
| his healthy and normal condition.  For this 
| reason clearly ~~ true philosophy is not merely 
| sense-derived and material like the French 
| philosophy of Helvetius, nor altogether ideal 
| like that of Plotinus, and the pious old 
| mathematical visionaries at Alexandria; but it 
| stands on mother earth, like old Antaeus drinking 
| strength therefrom, and filches fire at the same 
| time, Prometheus-like, from heaven, feeding men 
| with hopes ~~ not, as AEschylus says, altogether 
| <q> </q>, (<f> </f>) but only blinking.  Don't 
| court, therefore, if you would philosophize 
| wisely, to intimate an acquaintance with your 
| brute brother, the baboon ~~ a creature, whose 
| nature speculative naturalists have most 
| cunningly set forth by the theory, that it is a 
| parody which the devil, in a fit of ill humour, 
| made upon God's noblest work, man; and don't 
| hope, on the other hand, as many great saints and 
| sages have done, by prayer and fasting, or by 
| study and meditation, to work yourself up to a 
| god, and jump bodily out of your human skin.  
| Assume as the first postulate, and lay it down as 
| the last proposition of your <p> "philosophy of 
| life," </p> that a man is neither a brute, nor a 
| god, nor an angel, but simply and sheerly a MAN.  
| Furthermore, as man is not only a very 
| comprehensive and complex, but also, (to 
| appearance at least,) in many points, a very 
| contrary and contradictory creature, see that you 
| take the <hi rend="italic"> whole </hi> man along 
| with you into your metaphysical chamber; for if 
| there be one paper that has a bearing in the case 
| amissing out of your green bag, (which has 
| happened only too often,) the evidence will be 
| imperfect, and the sentence false or partial ~~ 
| shake your wig as you please.  Remember, that 
| though you may be a very subtle logician, the 
| soul of man is not all made up of logic; remember 
| that reason, (<hi rend="italic"> Vernunft, </hi>) 
| the purest that Kant ever criticized withal, is 
| not the proper vital soul in man; is not the 
| creative and productive faculty in intellect at 
| all, but is merely the tool of that which, in 
| philosophers no less than in poets, is the proper 
| inventive power, IMAGINATION, as Wordsworth 
| phrases it:  <q> </q>.  Remember that in more 
| cases than academic dignities may be willing to 
| admit, the heart (where a man has one) is the 
| only safe guide, the only legitimate ruler of the 
| head; and that a mere metaphysician, and solitary 
| speculator, however properly trimmed,
| <q> </q>
| may write very famous books, profound even to 
| unintelligibility, but can never be a 
| philosopher.  Therefore reject Hegel, <q> </q>; 
| and consider Kant as weighed in the balance and 
| found wanting on his own showing:  for if that 
| critical portal of pure reason had indeed been 
| sufficient, as it gave itself out to be, for all 
| the purposes of a human philosophy, what need was 
| there of the <p> "practical back-door" </p> 
| which, at the categorical command of conscience, 
| was afterwards laid open to all men in the 
| "Metaphysic of Ethics?"  As little will you allow 
| your philosophical need to be satisfied with any 
| thing you can get from SCHELLING; for however 
| well it sounds to <q> </q>, here also you will 
| find yourself haunted by the intellectual phantom 
| of absolute identity, (say absolute inanity,) or 
| in its best phases a <p> "pantheizing deification 
| of nature."  </p> Strange enough as it may seem, 
| the true philosophy is to be found any where 
| rather than among philosophers.  Each philosopher 
| builds up a reasoned system of a part of 
| <pb n="314">
| existence; but life is based upon God-given 
| instincts and emotions, with which reason has 
| nothing to do; and nature contains many things 
| which it is not given to mortal brain to 
| comprehend, much less to systematize.  True 
| philosophy is not to be found in any intellectual 
| system, much less in any of the Aristotelian 
| quality, where the emotional element in man is 
| excluded or subordinated; but in a living 
| experience.  To know philosophy, therefore, first 
| know life.  To learn to philosophize, learn to 
| live; and live not partially, but with the full 
| outspread vitality of human reason.  You go to 
| college, and, as if you were made altogether of 
| head, expect some Peter Abelard forth with, by 
| academic disputation, to <hi rend="italic"> 
| reason </hi> you into manhood; but neither 
| manhood nor any vital WHOLE ever was learned by 
| reasoning.  Pray, therefore, to the Author of all 
| good, in the first place, that you may 
| <hi rend="italic"> be </hi> something rather than 
| that you may <hi rend="italic"> know </hi> 
| something.  Get yourself planted in God's garden, 
| and learn to GROW.  Woo the sun of life, which is 
| love, and the breeze which is enthusiasm, an 
| impulse from that same creative Spirit, which, 
| brooding upon the primeval waters, out of void 
| brought fulness, and out of chaos a world.
| Such, shortly, so far as we can gather, is the 
| main scope, popularly stated, of Frederick 
| Schlegel's philosophy, as it is delivered in his 
| two first lectures on the philosophy of life, the 
| first being titled, "Of the thinking soul, or the 
| central point of consciousness;" and the second 
| <p> "Of the loving soul, or the central point of 
| moral life."  </p> The healthy-toned reader, who 
| has been exercised in speculations of this kind, 
| will feel at once that there is much that is 
| noble in all this, and much that it true; but not 
| a little also, when examined in detail, of that 
| sublime-sounding sweep of despotic generality, 
| (so inherent a vice of German literature,) which 
| delights to confound the differences, rather than 
| to discriminate the characters, of things; much 
| that seems only too justly to warrant that 
| oracular sentence of the stern Fichte with which 
| we set out, <q> </q>; much that, when applied to 
| practice, and consistently followed out in that 
| grand style of consistency which belongs to a 
| real German philosopher, becomes what we in 
| English call Puseyism and Popery, and what Goethe 
| in German called a <q> </q>.  But we have neither 
| space nor inclination, in this place, to make an 
| analysis of the Schlegelian philosophy, or to set 
| forth how much of it is true and how much of it 
| is false.  Our intention was merely to sketch a 
| rapid outline, in as popular phrase as philosophy 
| would allow itself to be clothed in; to finish 
| which outline without extraneous remark, with the 
| reader's permission, we now proceed.
| If man be not, according to Aristotle's phrase, a 
| <q> </q> in his highest faculty, a 
| <hi rend="italic"> ratiocinative, </hi> but rather an 
| emotional and imaginative animal; and if to start 
| from, as to end, in mere reason, be in human 
| psychology a gross one sidedness, much more in 
| theology is such a procedure erroneous, and 
| altogether perverse.  If not the smallest poem of 
| a small poet ever came to him from mere reason, 
| but from something deeper and more vital, much 
| less are the strong pulsations of pure emotion, 
| the deep-seated convictions of religious faith in 
| the inner man, to be spoke of as things that mere 
| reason can either assert or deny; and in fact we 
| see, when we look narrowly into the great 
| philosophical systems that have been projected by 
| scheming reasoners in France and Germany, each 
| man out of his own brain, that they all end 
| either in materialism and atheism on the one 
| hand, or in idealism and pantheism on the other.  
| All our philosophers have stopped short of that 
| one living, personal, moral God, on whose 
| existence alone humanity can confidently repose 
| ~~ who alone can give to the trembling arch of 
| human speculation that keystone which it demands.  
| The idea of God, in fact, is not a thing that 
| individual reason has first to strike out, so to 
| speak, by the collision or combination of ideas, 
| the collocation of proofs, and the concatenation 
| of arguments.  It is a living growth rather of 
| our whole nature, a primary instinct of all moral 
| beings, a necessary postulate of healthy 
| humanity, which is given and received as our life 
| and our breath is, and admits not of being 
| reasoned into any soul that has it not already 
| from other sources.  And as no philosopher of 
| Greek or German times that history tells of, ever 
| succeeded yet in inventing
| <pb n="315">
| a satisfactory theology, or establishing a 
| religion in which men could find solace to their 
| souls, therefore it is clear that that 
| satisfactory Christian theology and Christian 
| religion which we have, and not only that, but 
| all the glimpses of great theological truth that 
| are found twinkling through the darkness of a 
| wide-spread superstition, came originally from 
| God by common revelation, and not from man by 
| private reasoning.  The knowledge of God and a 
| living theology is, in fact, a simple science of 
| experience like any other, only of a peculiar 
| quality and higher in degree.  All true human 
| knowledge in moral matters rests on experience 
| internal or external, higher or lower, on 
| tradition, on language as the bearer of 
| tradition, on revelation; while that false, 
| monstrous, and unconditioned science to which the 
| pride of human reason has always aspired, which 
| would grasp at 
| <reg orig="every thing"> everything </reg> at once by 
| one despotic clutch, and by a violent bound of logic 
| bestride and beride the ALL, is, and remains, an 
| oscillating abortion that always would be 
| something, and always can be nothing.  A living, 
| personal, moral God, the faith of nations, the 
| watch-word of tradition, the cry of nature, the 
| demand of mind, received not invented, existing 
| in the soul not reasoned into it ~~ this is the 
| gravitating point of the moral world, the only 
| intelligible centre of any world; from which 
| whatsoever is centrifugal errs, and to which 
| whatsoever is opposed is the devil.
| Not private speculation, therefore, or famous 
| philosophies of any kind, but the living 
| spiritual man, and the totality of the living 
| flow of sacred tradition on which he is borne, 
| and with which he is encompassed, are the two 
| grand sources of <p> "the philosophy of life."  
| </p> Let us follow these principles, now, into a 
| few of their widespread streams and multiform 
| historical branchings.  First, the Bible clearly 
| indicates what the profoundest study of the 
| earliest and most venerable literatures confirms, 
| that man was not created at first in a brutish 
| state, crawling with a slow and painful progress 
| out of the dull slime of a half organic state 
| into apehood, and from apehood painfully into 
| manhood; but he was created perfect in the image 
| of God, and has fallen from his primeval glory.  
| This is to be understood not only of the state of 
| man before the Fall as recorded in the two first 
| chapters of Genesis; but 
| <reg orig="every thing"> everything </reg> in the 
| Bible, and the early traditions of famous 
| peoples, warrants us to believe, that the first 
| ages of men before the Flood, were spiritually 
| enlightened from one great common source of 
| extraordinary aboriginal revelation; so that the 
| earliest ages of the world were not the most 
| infantine and ignorant to a comprehensive survey, 
| as modern conceit so fondly images, but the most 
| gigantic and the most enlightened.  That 
| beautiful but material and debasing heathenism, 
| with which our Greek and Latin education has made 
| us so familiar, is only a defaced fragment of the 
| venerable whole which preceded it, that old and 
| true heathenism of the holy aboriginal fathers of 
| our race.  <q> </q>.  We read this; but who 
| believes it?  We ought seriously to consider what 
| it means, and adopt it <hi rend="italic"> bona 
| fide </hi> into our living faith of man, and 
| man's history.  Like the landscape of some Alpine 
| country, where the primeval granite Titans, 
| protruding their huge shoulders ever where above 
| us and around, make us feel how petty and how 
| weak a thing is man; so ought our imagination to 
| picture the inhabitants of the world before the 
| Flood.  Nobility precedes baseness always, and 
| truth is more ancient than error.  Antediluvian 
| man ~~ antediluvian nature, is to be imaged as 
| nobler in every respect, more sublime and more 
| pure than postdiluvian man, and postdiluvian 
| nature.  But mighty energies, when abused, 
| produce mighty corruptions; hence the gigantic 
| scale of the sins into which the antediluvian men 
| fell; and the terrible precipitation of humanity 
| which followed.  This is a point of primary 
| importance, in every attempt to understand how to 
| estimate the value of that world-famous Greek 
| philosophy, which is commonly represented as the 
| crown and the glory of the ancient world.  All 
| that Pythagoras and Plato ever wrote of noble and 
| elevating truths, are merely flashes of that 
| primeval light, in the full flood of which, man, 
| in his more perfect antediluvian state, delighted 
| to dwell; and it is remarkable in the case of 
| Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Thales, and so many other 
| of the Greek philosophers, that the further we 
| trace them back, we come nearer to the divine 
| truth, which,
| <pb n="316">
| in the systems of Epicurus, Aristippus, Zeno, or 
| the shallow or cold philosophers of later origin, 
| altogether disappears.  Pythagoras and Plato were 
| indeed divinely gifted with a scientific 
| presentiment of the great truths of Christianity 
| soon to be revealed, or say rather restored to 
| the world; while Aristotle, on the other hand, is 
| to be regarded as the father of those unhappy 
| academical schismatics from the Great Church of 
| living humanity, who allowed the ministrant 
| faculty of reason to assume an unlawful supremacy 
| over the higher powers of intellect, and gave 
| birth to that voracious despotism of barren 
| dialectics, in the middle ages commonly called 
| the scholastic philosophy.  The Greek philosophy, 
| however, even its noblest Avatar, Plato, much 
| less in the case of a Zeno or an Aristotle, was 
| never able to achieve that which must be the 
| practically proposed end of all higher philosophy 
| that is in earnest; viz. the coming out of the 
| narrow sphere of the school and the palaestra, 
| uniting itself with actual life, and embodying 
| itself completely in the shape of that which we 
| call a CHURCH.  This Platonism could not do.  
| Christianity did it.  Revelation did it.  God 
| incarnate did it.  Now once again came humanity 
| forth, fresh from the bosom of the divine 
| creativeness, conquering and to conquer.  There 
| was no Aristotle and Plato ~~ no Abelard and 
| Bernard here ~~ reason carping at imagination, 
| and imagination despising reason.  But once, if 
| but once in four thousand years, man appeared in 
| all the might of his living completeness. Love 
| walked hand in hand with knowledge, and both were 
| identified in life.  The spirit of divine peace 
| brooded in the inner sanctuary of the heart, 
| while the outer man was mailed for the sternest 
| warfare.  Such was pure Christianity, so long as 
| it lasted ~~ for the celestial plant was 
| condemned to grow with a stunted likeness of 
| itself.  It was more than stunted also ~~ it was 
| tainted; for are not all things tainted here?  Do 
| we not live in a tainted atmosphere? do we not 
| live in a time out of joint?  Does not the whole 
| creation literally groan?  Too manifestly it 
| does, however natural philosophers may affect to 
| speak of the book of nature, as if it were the 
| clear and uncorrupted text of the living book of 
| God.  Not only man, but the whole environment of 
| external nature, which belongs to him, has been 
| deranged by the Fall.  In such a world as this, 
| wherein whoso will not believe a devil cannot 
| believe a God, it was impossible for Christianity 
| to remain in that state of blissful vital harmony 
| with itself with which it set out.  It became 
| divided.  Extravagant developments of ambitious, 
| monopolizing faculties became manifest on every 
| side.  Self-sufficing Pelagianism and Arianism, 
| here; self-confounding Gnosticism and Manichaeism 
| there.  Then came those two great strifes and 
| divisions of the middle ages ~~ the one, that old 
| dualism of the inner man, the ever-repeated 
| strife between reason and imagination, to which 
| we have so often alluded ~~ the other, a no less 
| serious strife of the outward machinery of life, 
| the strife between the spiritual and the temporal 
| powers, between the Pope and the Emperor.  This 
| was bad enough; that the two vicars of God on 
| earth should not know to keep the peace among 
| themselves, when the keeping of the peace among 
| others was the very end and aim of the 
| appointment.  But worse times were coming.  For 
| in the middle ages, notwithstanding the rank 
| evils of barren scholasticism, secular-minded 
| popes, and intrusive emperors, there was still a 
| church, a common Christian religion, a common 
| faith of all Christians; but now, since that 
| anarchical and rebellious movement, commonly 
| called the Reformation, but more fitly termed the 
| revolution, the overturning and overthrowing of 
| the religion of Christendom, we have no more a 
| mere internal strife and division to vex us, but 
| there is an entire separation and divorce of one 
| part of the Christian church (so called) from the 
| main mother institution.  The abode of peace has 
| become the camp of war and the arena of battles; 
| that dogmatical theology of the Christian church, 
| which, if it be not the infallible pure 
| mathematics of the moral world, has been 
| deceiving men for 1800 years, and is a liar ~~ 
| that theology is now publicly discussed and 
| denied, scorned and scouted by men who do not 
| blush to call themselves Christians; there is no 
| universal peace any longer to be found in that 
| region where it is the
| <pb n="317">
| instinct of humanity, before all things, to seek 
| repose; the only religious peace which the 
| present age recognizes, is that of which the 
| Indian talks, when he says of certain epochs of 
| the world's history, <q> </q>!  Those who sleep 
| and are indifferent in spiritual matters find 
| peace; but those who are alive and awake must 
| beat the wind, and battle, belike, with much 
| useless loss of strength, before they can arrive 
| even at that first postulate of all healthy 
| thinking ~~ there is a God.  <q> </q>, said 
| Herder.  <q> </q>.  Yet look at German 
| rationalism, look at Protestant theology ~~ what 
| do you see there?  Reason usurping the mastery in 
| each individual, without control of the higher 
| faculties of the soul, and of those institutions 
| in life by which those faculties are represented; 
| and, as one man's reason is as good as another's, 
| thence arises war of each self-asserted despotism 
| against that which happens to be next it, and of 
| all against all ~~ a spiritual anarchy, which 
| threatens the entire dissolution of the moral 
| world, and from which there is no refuge but in 
| recurring to the old traditionary faith of a 
| revolted humanity, no redemption but in the 
| venerable repository of those traditions ~~ the 
| one and indivisible holy Catholic church of 
| Christ, of whom, as the inner and eternal 
| keystone is God, so the outer and temporal is the 
| Pope.
| Such is a general outline of the philosophy of 
| Frederick Schlegel ~~ a philosophy belonging to 
| the class theological and supernatural, to the 
| genus Christian, to the species sacerdotal and 
| Popish.  Now, without stopping here to blame its 
| sublime generalities and beautiful confusions, on 
| the one hand, or to praise its elevated tendency, 
| its catholic and reconciling tone on the other, 
| we shall merely call attention, in a single 
| sentence, physiologically, to its main and 
| distinguishing character.  It was, in fact, (in 
| spirit and tendency, though not in outward 
| accomplishment,) to German literature twenty 
| years ago what Puseyism is now to the English 
| church ~~ it was a bold and grand attempt to get 
| rid of those vexing doubts and disputes on the 
| most important subjects that will ever disquiet 
| minds of a certain constitution, so long as they 
| have nothing to lean on but their own judgment; 
| and as Protestantism, when consistently carried 
| out, summarily throws a man back on his 
| individual opinion, and subjects the vastest and 
| most momentous questions to the scrutiny of 
| reason and the torture of doubt, therefore 
| Schlegel in literary Germany, and Pusey in 
| ecclesiastical England, were equally forced, if 
| they would not lose Christianity altogether, to 
| renounce Protestantism, and to base their 
| philosophy upon sacerdotal authority and 
| ecclesiastical tradition.  That Schlegel became a 
| Romanist at Cologne, and Dr Pusey an 
| Anglo-Catholic at Oxford, does not affect the kinship. 
| Both, to escape from the anarchy of Protestant 
| individualism, (as it was felt by them,) were 
| obliged to assert not merely Christianity, but a 
| hierarchy ~~ not merely the Bible, but an 
| authoritative interpretation of the Bible; and 
| both found, or seemed to find, that authoritative 
| interpretation and exorcism of doubt there, where 
| alone in their circumstances, and intellectually 
| constituted as they were, it was to be found.  Dr 
| Pusey did not become a Papist like Frederick 
| Schlegel, for two plain reasons ~~ first, because 
| he was an Englishman; second, because he was an 
| English churchman.  The authority which he sought 
| for lay at his door; why should he travel to Rome 
| for it?  Archbishop Laud had taught apostolical 
| succession before ~~ Dr Pusey might teach it 
| again.  But this convenient prop of Popery 
| without the Pope, was not prepared for Frederick 
| Schlegel.  There was no Episcopal church, no 
| Oxford in Germany, into whose bosom he could 
| throw himself, and find relief from the agony of 
| religious doubt.  He was a German, moreover, and 
| a philosopher.  To his searching eye and 
| circumspective wariness, the general basis of 
| tradition which might satisfy a Pusey, though 
| sufficiently broad, did not appear sure enough.  
| To his lofty architectural imagination a 
| hierarchical aristocracy, untopped by a 
| hierarchical monarch, did not appear sufficiently 
| sublime.  To his all-comprehending and 
| all-combining historical sympathies, a Christian 
| priesthood, with Cyprian, Augustine, and Jerome, 
| but without Hildebrand, Innocent, and Boniface, 
| would have presented the appearance of a fair 
| landscape, with a black yawning chasm in the 
| middle, into which whoever looked shuddered.  
| Therefore Frederick Schlegel, spurning all half 
| measures,
| <pb n="318">
| inglorious compromises, and vain attempts to 
| reconcile the irreconcilable, vaulted himself at 
| once, with a bold leap, into the central point of 
| sacerdotal Christianity.  The obstacles that 
| would have deterred ordinary minds had no effect 
| on him.  All points of detail were sunk in the 
| overwhelming importance of the general question.  
| Transubstantiation or consubstantiation, 
| conception, maculate or immaculate, were a matter 
| of small moment with him.  What he wanted was 
| divinely commissioned church with sacred 
| mysteries ~~ a spiritual house of refuge from the 
| weary battle of intellectual east winds, blasting 
| and barren, with which he saw Protestant Germany 
| desolated.  This house of refuge he found in 
| Cologne, in Vienna; and having once made up his 
| mind that spiritual unity and peace were to be 
| found only in the one mother church of 
| Christendom, not being one of those half 
| characters who, <q> </q>, are continually weaving 
| a net of paltry external <hi rend="italic"> no's 
| </hi> to entangle the progress of every grand 
| decided <hi rend="italic"> yes </hi> of the inner 
| man, Schlegel did not for a moment hesitate to 
| make his thought a deed, and publicly profess his 
| return to Romanism in the face of enlightened and 
| <p> "ultra-Protestant" </p> Germany.  To do this 
| certainly required some moral courage; and no 
| just judge of human actions will refuse to 
| sympathize with the motive of this one, however 
| little he may feel himself at liberty to agree 
| with the result.
| But Frederick Schlegel, a well informed writer 
| has said, <q> </q>.  We have not been able to 
| see, from a careful perusal of his works, (in all 
| of which there is more or less of theology,) that 
| there is any foundation for this assertion of 
| Varnhagen.  Frederick Schlegel, the German, was 
| as honest and stout a Romanist in this nineteenth 
| century as any Spanish Ferdinand Catholicus in 
| the fifteenth.  Freedom of speculation indeed, 
| within certain known limits, and spirituality of 
| creed above what the meager charity of some 
| Protestants may conceive possible in a Papist, we 
| do find in this man; but these good qualities a 
| St Bernard, a Dante, a Savonarola, a Fenelon, had 
| exhibited in the Romish Church before Schlegel, 
| and others as great may exhibit them again.  
| Freedom of thought, however, in the sense in 
| which it is understood by Protestants, was the 
| very thing which Schlegel, Göres, Adam Muller, 
| and so many others, did give up when they entered 
| the Catholic Church.  They felt as Wordsworth did 
| when he wrote his beautiful ode to "Duty;" they 
| had more liberty than they knew how to use ~~
| <q> </q>
| And if it seem strange to 
| <reg orig="any one"> anyone </reg> that Frederick 
| Schlegel, the learned, the profound, the 
| comprehensive, should believe in 
| Transubstantiation,
| <pb n="319">
| let him look at a broader aspect of history than 
| that of German books, and ask himself ~~ Did 
| Isabella of Castile ~~ the gentle, the noble, the 
| generous ~~ establish the Inquisition, or allow 
| Ximenes to establish it?  In a world which 
| surrounds us on all sides with apparent 
| contradictions, he who admits a real one now and 
| then into his faith, or into his practice, is 
| neither a fool nor a monster.
| <paragraph>
| In his political opinions, Schlegel maintained 
| the same grand consistency that characterizes his 
| religious philosophy.  He had more sense, 
| however, and more of the spirit of Christian 
| fraternity in him than, for the sake of 
| absolutism, to become a Turk or a Russian; nay, 
| from some passages in the <hi rend="italic"> 
| Concordia </hi> ~~ a political journal, published 
| by him and his friend Adam Muller, in 1820, and 
| quoted by Mr Robertson ~~ it would almost appear 
| that he would have preferred a monarchy limited 
| by states, conceived in the spirit of the middle 
| ages, to the almost absolute form of monarchical 
| government, under whose protection he lived and 
| lectured at Vienna.  To some such constitution as 
| that which now exists in Sweden, for instance, we 
| think he would have head no objections.  At the 
| same time, it is certain he gave great offence to 
| the constitutional party in Germany, by the 
| anti=popular tone of his writings generally, more 
| perhaps than by any special absolutist abuses 
| which he had publicly patronized.  He was, 
| indeed, a decided enemy to the modern system of 
| representative constitutions, and popular checks; 
| a king by divine right according to the idea of 
| our English nonjurors, was as necessary a 
| corner-stone to his political, as a pope by apostolical 
| succession to his ecclesiastical edifice.  And as 
| no confessed corruption of the church, 
| represented as it might be by the monstrous 
| brutality of a Borgia, or the military madness of 
| a Julius, was, in his view, sufficient to 
| authorize any hasty Luther to make a profane 
| bonfire of a papal bull; any hot Henry to usurp 
| the trade of manufacturing creeds; so no <p> "sacred 
| right of insurrection," </p> no unflinching patriotic 
| opposition, no claim of rights, (by petitioners 
| having <hi rend="italic"> swords </hi> in their 
| hands,) are admissible in his system of a 
| Christian state.  And as for the British 
| constitution, and "the glorious Revolution of 
| 1688," this latter, indeed, is one of the best of 
| a bad kind, and that boasted constitution as an 
| example of a house divided against itself, and 
| yet <hi rend="italic"> not </hi> falling, is a 
| perfect miracle of dynamical art, a lucky 
| accident of politics, scarcely to be looked for 
| again in the history of social development, much 
| less to be eagerly sought after and ignorantly 
| imitated.  Nay, rather, if we look at this 
| boasted constitution a little more narrowly, and 
| instruct ourselves as to its practical working, 
| what do we see?  <q> </q>.  It is but too 
| manifest, indeed, according to Schlegel's 
| projection of the universe, that all 
| constitutionalism is, properly speaking, a sort 
| of political Protestantism, a fretful fever of 
| the social body, having its origin (like the 
| religious epidemic of the sixteenth century) in 
| the private conceit of the individual, growing by 
| violence and strife, and ending in dissolution.  
| This is the ever-repeated refrain of his 
| political discourses; puerile enough, it may be, 
| to our rude hearing in Britain, but very grateful 
| to polite and patriotic ears at Vienna, when the 
| cannon of Wagram was yet sounding in audible echo 
| beneath their towers.  The propounder of such 
| philosophy had not only the common necessity of 
| all philosophers to pile up his political in 
| majestic consistency with his ecclesiastical 
| creed, but he had also to pay back the mad French 
| liberalism with something more mad if possible, 
| and more despotic.  And if also Danton, and 
| Mirabean, and Robespierre, and other terrible 
| Avatars of the destroying Siva in Paris, had 
| raised his naturally
| <pb n="320>
| romantic temperament a little into the febrile 
| and delirious now and then, what wonder?  Shall 
| the devil walk the public streets at noon day, 
| and men not be afraid?
| <paragraph>
| We said that Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, 
| political and religious, but chiefly religious, 
| was the grand key to his popular work on the 
| history of literature.  We may illustrate this 
| now by a few instances.  In the first place, the 
| "many-sided" Goethe seems to be as little 
| profound as he is charitable, when he sees 
| nothing in the Sanscrit studies of the romantic 
| brothers but a <hi rend="italic"> pis aller, 
| </hi> and a vulgar ambition to bring forward 
| something new, and make German men stare.  We do 
| not answer for the elder brother; but Frederick 
| certainly made the cruise to the east, as 
| Columbus did to the west, from a romantic spirit 
| of adventure.  He was not pleased with the old 
| world ~~ he wished to find a new world more to 
| his mind; and, beyond the Indus, he found it.  
| The Hindoos to him were the Greeks of the 
| aboriginal world ~~ <q> </q> ~~ and so much 
| better and more divine than the western Greeks, 
| as the aboriginal world was better and more 
| divine than that which came after it.  If 
| imagination was the prime, the creative faculty 
| in man, here, in the holy Eddas, it had sat 
| throned for thousands of years as high as the 
| Himalayas.  If repose was sought for, and rest to 
| the soul from the toil and turmoil of religious 
| wars in Europe, here, in the secret meditations 
| of pious Yooges, waiting to be absorbed into the 
| bosom of Brahma, surely peace was to be found.  
| Take another matter.  Why did Frederick Schlegel 
| make so much talk of the middle ages?  Why were 
| the times, so dark to others, instinct to him 
| with a steady solar effluence, in comparison of 
| which the boasted enlightenment of these latter 
| days was but as the busy exhibition of squibs by 
| impertinent boys, the uncertain trembling of 
| fire-flies in a dusky twilight?  The middle ages 
| were historically the glory of Germany; and those 
| who had lived to see and to feel the 
| Confederation of the Rhine, and the Protectorate 
| of Napoleon, did not require the particular 
| predilections of a Schlegel to carry them back 
| with eager reaction to the days of the Henries, 
| the Othos, and the Fredericks, when to be the 
| German emperor was to be the greatest man in 
| Europe, after the Pope.  But to Schlegel the 
| middle ages were something more.  The glory of 
| Germany to the patriot, they were the glory of 
| Europe to the thinker.  Modern wits have laughed 
| at the enthusiasm of the Crusades.  Did they weep 
| over the pertidy of the partition of Poland?  Do 
| they really trust themselves to persuade a 
| generous mind that the principle of mutual 
| jealousy and mere selfishness, the meagre 
| inspiration of the so-called balance of power in 
| modern politics, is, according to any norm of 
| nobility in action, a more laudable motive for a 
| public war, than a holy zeal against those who 
| were at once the enemies of Christ, and (as 
| future events but too clearly showed) the enemies 
| of Europe?  Modern wits sneer at the scholastic 
| driveling or the cloudy mistiness of the writers 
| of the middle ages.  Did they ever blush for the 
| impious baseness of Helvetius, for the portentous 
| scaffolding of notional skeletons of Hegel?  But, 
| alas! we talk of we know not what.  What 
| spectacle does modern life present equal to that 
| of St Bernard, the pious monk of Clairvaux, the 
| feeble, emaciated thinker, brooding, with his 
| dove-like eyes, (<f> </f>,) over the wild motions 
| of the twelfth century, and by the calm might of 
| divine love, guiding the scepter of the secular 
| king, and the crosier of the spiritual pontiff 
| alike?  Was that a weak or a dark age, when the 
| strength of mind and the light of love could 
| triumph so signally over brute force, and that 
| natural selfishness of public motive which has 
| achieved its cold, glittering triumphs in the 
| lives of so many  modern heroes and heroines ~~ a 
| Louis, a Frederick, a Catharine, a Napoleon?  But 
| indeed here, as elsewhere, we see that the modern 
| world has fallen altogether into a practical 
| atheism by the idolatry of mere reason; whereas 
| all true greatness comes not down from the head, 
| but up from the heart of man.  In which greatness 
| of the heart, the Bernards and the Barbarossas of 
| the middle ages excelled; and therefore they were 
| better than we.
| <paragraph>
| It is by no means necessary for the admirer of 
| Schlegel to maintain that all this <f> eulogium 
| </f> of the twelfth century, or this depreciation 
| of the times we live in, is just and 
| well-merited.  Nothing is more cheap than to praise a 
| pretty village perched far
| <pb n="321">
| away amid the blue skies, and to rail at the 
| sharp edges and corners of things that fret 
| against our ribs.  Let it be admitted that there 
| is not a little of artistical decoration, and a 
| great deal of optical illusion, in the matter; 
| still there is some truth, some great truth, that 
| lay in comparative neglect till Schlegel brought 
| it into prominency.  This is genuine literary 
| merit; it is that sort of discovery, so to speak, 
| which makes criticism original.  And it was not 
| merely with the bringing forward of new 
| materials, but by throwing new lights on the old, 
| that Frederick Schlegel enriched aesthetical 
| science.  If the criticism of the nineteenth 
| century may justly boast of a more catholic 
| sympathy, of a wider flight, of a more 
| comprehensive view, and more various feast than 
| that which it superseded, it owes this, with 
| something that belongs to the spirit of the age 
| generally, chiefly to the special captainship of 
| Frederick Schlegel.  If the grand spirit of 
| combination and comprehension which distinguished 
| the "Lectures on Ancient and Modern Literature," 
| be that quality which mainly distinguishes the so 
| called Romantic from the Classical school of 
| aesthetics, then let us profess ourselves 
| Romanticists by all means immediately; for the 
| one seems to include the other as the genus does 
| the species.  The beauty of Frederick Schlegel 
| is, that his romance arches over 
| <reg orig="every thing"> everything </reg> like 
| a sky, and excludes nothing; he delights indeed 
| to override <reg orig="every thing"> everything 
| </reg> despotically, with one 
| dominant theological and ecclesiastical idea, and 
| now and then, of course, gives rather a rough jog 
| to whatever thing may stand in his way; but 
| generally he seeks about with cautious, 
| conscientious care to find room for 
| <reg orig="every thing;"> everything; </reg> 
| and for a wholesale dealer in denunciation (as in 
| some views we cannot choose but call him) is 
| really the most kind, considerate, and charitable 
| Aristarchus that ever wielded a pen.  Hear what 
| Varnhagen Von Ense says on this point ~~ <q> 
| </q>.  We take the hint.  It is not every Byron 
| that finds a Goethe to take him to pieces and 
| build him up again, and peruse him and admire 
| him, as Cuvier did the Mammoth.  Those who feel 
| an inward vocation to do so by Schlegel may yet 
| do so in Germany; if there be any in these busy 
| times, even there, who may have leisure to 
| applaud such a work.  To us in Britain it may 
| suffice to have essayed to exhibit the fruit and 
| the final results, without attempting curiously 
| to dissect the growth of Schlegel's criticism.
| <paragraph>
| The outward fates of this great critic's life may 
| be found, like <reg orig="every thing"> everything 
| </reg> else, in the famous 
| "Conversations Lexicon;" but as very few readers 
| of these remarks, or students of the history of 
| ancient and modern literature, may be in 
| condition to refer to that most useful Cyclopaedia 
| of literary reference, we may here sketch the 
| main lines of Schlegel's biography from the 
| sources supplied by
| <pb n="322">
| Mr Robertson, in the preface to his excellent 
| translation of the "Lectures on the philosophy of 
| history."  Whatever we take from a different 
| source will be distinctly noted.
| <paragraph>
| The brothers Schlegel belonged to what Frederick 
| in his lectures calls the third generation of 
| modern German literature.  The whole period from 
| 1750 to 1800, being divided into three 
| generations, the first comprehends all those 
| whose period of greatest activity falls into the 
| first decade, from 1750 to 1760, and thereabout.  
| Its chief heroes are Wieland, Klopstock, and 
| Lessing.  These men of course were all born 
| before the year 1730.  The second generation 
| extends from 1770 to 1790, and thereabouts, and 
| presents a development, which stands to the first 
| in the relation of summer to spring ~~ Goethe and 
| Schiller are the two names by which it will be 
| sent down to posterity.  Of these the one was 
| born in 1749, and the other in 1759.  Then 
| follows that third generation to which Schlegel 
| himself belongs, and which is more generally 
| known in literary history as the era of the 
| Romantic school ~~~ a school answering both in 
| chronology, and in many points of character also, 
| to what we call the Lake school in England.  
| Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, are 
| contemporaries of Tieck, Novalis, and the 
| Schlegels.  Their political contemporaries are 
| Napoleon and Wellington.  The event which gave a 
| direction to their literary development, no less 
| decidedly than it did to the political history of 
| Europe, was the French Revolution.  Accordingly, 
| we find that all these great European characters 
| ~~ for so they all are more or less ~~ made the 
| all-important passage from youth into manhood 
| during the ferment of the years that followed 
| that ominous date, 1789.  This coincidence 
| explains the celebrity of the famous biographical 
| year 1769 ~~ Walter Scott was born in that year, 
| Wellington and Napoleon, as 
| <reg orig="every body"> everybody </reg> knows ~~ 
| and the elder Aristarchus of the Romantic school, 
| <hi rend="italic"> the </hi> translator of 
| Shakespeare, Augustus William Von Schlegel, was 
| born in 1767.  At Hanover, five years later, was 
| born his brother Frederick, that is to say, in 
| May 1772, and our Coleridge in the same year ~~ 
| and to carry on the parallel for another year, 
| Ludwig Tieck, Henry Steffens, and Novalis, were 
| all born in 1773.  These dates are curious; when 
| taken along with the great fact of the age ~~ the 
| French Revolution ~~ they may serve to that 
| family likeness which we have noted in 
| characterizing the Romanticists in Germany and 
| the Lake school in England.  When Coleridge here 
| was dreaming of America and Pantisocracy, 
| Frederick Schlegel was studying Plato, and 
| scheming republics there.  In the first years of 
| his literary career, Schlegel devoted himself 
| chiefly to classical literature; and between 1794 
| and 1797 published several works on Greek and 
| Roman poetry and philosophy, the substance of 
| which was afterwards concentrated into the four 
| first lectures on the history of literature.  
| About this time he appears to have lived chiefly 
| by his literary exertions ~~ a method of 
| obtaining a livelihood very precarious, (as those 
| know best who have tried it,) and to men of a 
| turn of mind more philosophical than popular, 
| even in philosophical Germany, exceedingly 
| irksome.  Schlegel felt this as deeply as poor 
| Coleridge ~~ <q> </q>, says he, in one of those 
| letters to Rahel from which we have just quoted 
| ~~ <q> </q>.  Happily, to keep him from absolute 
| starvation, be married the daughter of Moses 
| Mendelsohn, the Jewish philosopher, who, it 
| appears, had a few pence in her pocket, but not 
| many; and between these, and the produce of his 
| own pen, which could move with equal facility in 
| French as in German, he managed not merely
| <pb n="323">
| to keep himself and his wife alive, but to 
| transport himself to Paris in the year 1802, and 
| remain there for a year or two, laying the 
| foundation for that oriental evangel which, in 
| 1808, he proclaimed to his countrymen in the 
| little book, <f> </f>.  Meanwhile, in the year 
| 1805, he had returned from France to his own 
| Germany ~~ alas, then about to be 
| <hi rend="italic"> one </hi> Germany no more!  And 
| while the sun of Austerlitz was rising brightly 
| on the then Emperor of France, and soon to be 
| protector of the Rhine, the future secretary of 
| the Archduke Charles, and literary evangelist of 
| Prince Metternich, was prostrating himself before 
| the three holy kings, and swearing fealty to the 
| shade of Charlemagne in Catholic Cologne.  There 
| were some men in those days base enough to 
| impeach the purity of Schlegel's motives in the 
| public profession thus made of the old Romish 
| faith.  Such men, wherever they are to be found 
| now or then, ought to be whipped out of the 
| world.  If mere worldly motives could have had 
| any influence on such a mind, the gates of Berlin 
| were as open to him as the gates of Vienna.  As 
| it was, not wishing to expatriate himself, like 
| Winkelmann, he had nowhere to go to but Vienna; 
| in those days, indeed, mere patriotism and 
| Teutonic feeling, (in which the Romantic school 
| was never deficient,) independently altogether of 
| Popery, could lead him nowhere else.  To Vienna, 
| accordingly, he went; and Vienna is not a place 
| ~~ whatever Napoleon, after Mack's affair, might 
| say of the <q> </q> ~~ where a man like Schlegel 
| will ever be neglected.  Prince Metternich and 
| the Archduke Charles had eyes in their head; and 
| with the latter, therefore, we find the great 
| Sanscrit scholar marching to share the glory of 
| Aspern and the honour of Wagram; while the former 
| afterwards decorated him with what of courtly 
| remuneration, in the shape of titles and 
| pensions, it is the policy alike and the 
| privilege of politicians to bestow on poets and 
| philosophers who can do them service.  Nay, with 
| some diplomatic missions and messages to 
| Frankfurt also, we find the Romantic philosopher 
| entrusted; and even in the great European 
| Congress of Vienna in 1815, he appears exhibiting 
| himself, in no undignified position, alongside of 
| Gentz, Cardinal Gonsalvi, and the Prince of 
| Benevento.  We are not to imagine, however, from 
| this, either that the comprehensive philosopher 
| of history had any peculiar talent for practical 
| diplomacy, or that he is to be regarded as a 
| thorough Austrian in politics.  For the nice 
| practical problems of diplomacy, he was perhaps 
| the very worst man in the world; and what 
| Varnhagen states in the place just referred to, 
| that Schlegel was, what we should call in 
| England, far too much of a high churchman for 
| Prince Metternich, is only too manifest from the 
| well-known ecclesiastical policy of the Austrian 
| government, contrasted as it is with the 
| ultramontane and Guelphic views propounded by the 
| Viennese lecturer in his philosophy of the 
| eleventh and twelfth centuries.  Frederick 
| Schlegel wished to see the state, with relation 
| to the church, in the attitude that Frederick 
| Barbarossa assumed before Alexander III. at 
| Venice ~~ kneeling, and holding the stirrup.
| <q> </q>
| Joseph II., in his estimation, had inverted the 
| poles of the moral world, making the state 
| supreme, and the church subordinate ~~ that 
| degrading position, which the Non-intrusionists 
| picture to themselves when they talk of 
| ERASTIANISM, and which Schlegel would have 
| denominated simply ~~ PROTESTANTISM.
| During his long residence at Vienna, from 1806 to 
| 1828, Schlegel delivered four courses of public 
| lectures in the following order: ~~ One-and-twenty
| lectures on Modern History, delivered in 
| the year 1810; sixteen lectures on Ancient and 
| Modern Literature, delivered in the spring of
| <pb n="324">
| 1812; fifteen lectures on the Philosophy of Life, 
| delivered in 1827; and lastly, eighteen lectures 
| on the Philosophy of History, delivered in 1828.  
| Of these, the Philosophy of Life contains the 
| theory, as the lectures on literature and on 
| history do the application, of Schlegel's 
| catholic and combining system of human intellect, 
| and, altogether, they form a complete and 
| consistent body of Schlegelism.  Three works more 
| speculatively complete, and more practically 
| useful in their way, the production of one 
| consistent architectural mind, are, in the 
| history of literature, not easily to be found.
| Towards the close of the year 1828, Schlegel 
| repaired to Dresden, a city endeared to him by 
| the recollections of enthusiastic juvenile 
| studies.  Here he delivered nine lectures <f> 
| </f>, a work which the present writer laments 
| much that he has not seen; as it is manifest that 
| the prominency given in Schlegel's Philosophy of 
| Life above sketched to living experience and 
| primeval tradition, must, along with his various 
| accomplishments as a linguist, have eminently 
| fitted him for developing systematically the high 
| significance of human speech.  On Sunday the 11th 
| January 1829, he was engaged in composing a 
| lecture which was to be delivered on the 
| following Wednesday, and had just come to the 
| significant words ~~ <q> </q> ~~ <q> </q> ~~ when 
| the mortal palsy suddenly seized his hand, and 
| before one o'clock on the same night he had 
| ceased to philosophize.  The words with which his 
| pen ended its long and laborious career, are 
| characteristic enough, both of the general 
| imperfection of human knowledge, and of the 
| particular quality of Schlegel's mind.  The 
| Germans have a proverb: ~~ <q> </q>.  This is the 
| general human vice that lies in that significant 
| ABER.  But Schlegel's part in it is a virtue ~~ 
| one of his greatest virtues ~~ a conscientious 
| anxiety never to state a general proposition in 
| philosophy, without, at the same time, stating in 
| what various ways the eternal truth comes to be 
| limited and modified in practice.  Great, indeed, 
| is the virtue of a Schlegelian ABER.  Had it not 
| been for that, he would have had his place long 
| ago among the vulgar herds of erudite and 
| intellectual dogmatists.
| Heinrich Steffens, a well-known literary and 
| scientific character in Germany, in his personal 
| memoirs recently published, describes Frederick 
| Schlegel, at Jena in 1798, as <q> </q>.  He was 
| thus a thorough German in his temperament; so at 
| least as Englishmen and Frenchmen, of a more 
| nimble blood, delight to picture the Rhenish 
| Teut, not always in the most complimentary 
| contrast with themselves.  As it is, his merit 
| shines forth only so much the more, that being a 
| German of the Germans, he should by one small 
| work, more of a combining than of a creative 
| character, have achieved an European reputation 
| and popularity with a certain sphere, that bids 
| fair to last for a generation or two, at least, 
| even in this book-making age.  Such an earnest 
| devotedness of research; such a gigantic capacity 
| of appropriation; such a kingly faculty of 
| comprehension, will rarely be found united in one 
| individual.  The multifarious truths which the 
| noble industry of such a spirit either evolved 
| wisely or happily disposed, will long continue to 
| be received as a welcome legacy by our studious 
| youth; and as for his errors in a literary point 
| of view, and with reference to British use, 
| practically considered, they are the mere breadth 
| of fantastic colouring which, being removed, does 
| not destroy the drawing.
|