after a warfare continued with various fortune for many years, has at last become a province of Russia; and the garrisons of that nation now extend to the banks of the Araxes, and along the southern shores of the Caspian.' The Shah is advantageously known in this country, by the pleasing address and bushy beard of his embassador, who graced for a time the metropolis of our Isle. Of his reign, General Malcolm has furnished few particulars: but his silence is eloquent. It was our resolution to claim the attention of our readers to the luminous and able account which General Malcolm has exhibited of the ancient and modern religion of Persia-its doctrines, its ceremonies, and its effects. We also had wished to extract some portion of the new and curious information he has furnished relative to the sect of Sufis, whose mystical absurdities are conveyed through the medium of delightful poetry. The picture he has delineated of the present state of manners, science, literature and finance, would each have deserved more than a casual mention; but the length of observation and of extract in which we have already indulged, compels us to take our leave of this valuable and instructive publication. ART. III. Aus Meinem Leben, Dichtung und Wahrheit VON Tü THE HE German Muse has, of late years, been by far the most prolific of the sisterhood, and has certainly cause enough to be proud of some of her offspring;-although, in her time, she has been delivered of a more numerous litter of moon-calves and sooterkins than any of her kindred; and malicious people pretend, that, in the countenances even of her handsomest children, there may be traced a strong likeness to their mishapen brethren. For our own parts, however, we give no credit to that ill-natured surmise; and, considering the German literati as in a great measure the pupils of the English, we cannot help viewing them with parental fondness for their well-meant endeavours, although, as yet, they have not been able to equal us in the manufacture either of Manchester goods or of Shakespeares. The astonishing rapidity of the development of German literature, has been the principal cause both of its imperfections, and of the enthusiasm of its warmer admirers. About five-andtwenty or thirty years ago, all we knew about Germany was that it was a vast tract of country, overrun with hussars and classical editors;-and that, if you went there, you would see a great tun at Heidelbergh; and be regaled with excellent old hock and Westphalia hams; the taste for which good things was so predominant, as to preclude the slightest approach to poetical grace or enthusiasm. At that time, we had never seen a German name affixed to any other species of writing than a treaty, by which some Serene Highness or another had sold us so many head of soldiers for American consumption, at a fair and reasonable market-price; or to a formidable apparatus of critical annotation, teeming with word-catching and billinsgate in Greek and Latin. When it was discovered, ali at once, that these laborious scholars had been suddenly metamorphosed into poets, novellists, and dramatists of all descriptions, it was natural to expect that the effect should be heightened by the contrast, and that we should make amends for our long contempt by a sudden burst of praise and admiration. It could not be long, however, till it was discovered, that the very rapidity of this creation had infallibly filled it with imperfections, and that a sudden and entire revolution in the taste of a nation was not the best preparation for a national taste either just or durable. It has been our good fortune, that the canonical succession of genius amongst us has never been interrupted, but has been transmitted, in regular descent, from the first fathers of poetry and eloquence, to the present inheritors of their glories. The great wits of every age have been proud to acknowledge the benefits which they derived from the example of their predecessors. The rugged and moss-grown oaks of the sacred forest are still standing in green old age, in the midst of the towering and vigorous stems which have sprung from the same roots, and have been nourished in the same healthy soil. The German Parnassus, on the other hand, was, till lately, a wide uncultivated waste; and when its possessors became ashamed of its sterility, they employed all possible pains to convert it at once into a picturesque plantation. They crowded it, therefore, with seedlings and saplings of every tree, and with exotics from every clime; and the consequence was, that many of them withered and died—whilst others shot up with a rank luxuriancy of vegetation, and sprouted into a thousand uncouth varieties. The earlier of the German writers, those who flourished about the time of Goethe's youth, were denied the advantages of national models; and, instead of being guided by public opinion, or directed by national taste, they had the double task to perform, of creating the love of elegant literature, and of satisfying that desire in proportion as they succeeded in exciting it. Under these circumstances, they began by being imitators-implicit servile imitators; and, with the usual felicity of copyists, the spirit of the originals escaped them, whilst all their faults were carefully preserved. The followers of the French tripped along, bedizened in trumpery and tinsel. They too would say soft things, and be witty freethinkers, and smart philosophers: But the liquor which might have been sparkling champaigne at Ferney, proved vapid swipes when uncorked and unbottled in the stove-heated atmosphere of Leipsick or Weimar. Our self-love may incline us to judge more favourably of those who looked to England for their models; but our confidence in their judgment will be shaken, when it is recollected that Milton is only a sharer in the applauses which they bestow with still greater liberality on the Ossian of Macpherson! Bolder heads, however, aspired to the merits of originality; and as they were freed from those salutary restraints by which the rash absurdity of wit is kept within due limits, they soon became outrageously original. There was no general feeling which it was necessary to conciliate by avoiding too wide a departure from habitual modes of thinking:-a restraint, as useful in the world of literature, as the rules of politeness are in common life. They addressed themselves to readers who had no fixed opinions of their own, and few of whom would dare to object to any thing which they saw in print. Unawed by the apprehension of efficient censure, the most worthless and paltry of the scribbling tribe assumed the portliest shapes, like shrivelled apples swelling themselves up in vacuo; and the more an author's writings were unlike what had been written in any other age or nation, the more he taught his public to consider him as a genuine German, and as displaying, in all its effulgence, the character of the nation. These gross and palpable deformities are diminishing; but the era of good taste and sound judgment has not yet arrived. This sounds harshly-but we are afraid the proofs of it are too strong to be resisted. With the single exception of Schiller, they have no writer of chaste or elegant prose. Good poetry is common to every age, but prose alone is the test by which mental refinement can be unequivocally ascertained. There is another decisive indication that their literature has not attained maturity. They have not learnt that every kind of composition should preserve a character of its own, consistent to its nature and intent. In the early stages of society, the chieftain prides himself on being a good boat- builder, or in cooking his own dinner. When civilization advances, it is discovered, that although it is highly useful to be able to handle a hatchet, or to turn a spit, it is yet more advantageous that trades and employments should be divided amongst the community, instead of centering in each of its members; and people then keep to their own occupation, to that to which they have served their apprenticeship, without attempting to dabble in the handicrafts of their neighbours. The commonwealth of literature passes through analogous gradations. of refinement. At the revival of letters, and for a long time afterwards, every one conceived that he could not sustain his intellectual rank, unless he was a proficient in every branch of study; and that the readiest way of displaying his universal acquirements was, to make a show of excelling precisely in that department of learning which was most unnecessary in his parti cular calling. He placed himself in the Antipodes, to prove that he had circumnavigated the globe. Those ornaments which were least suitable, were deemed the most satisfactory. The white bosom of Florinda was praised in syllogisms and problems. Citations from Ovid and Petronius adorned a godly book. And an argument before the judges in Westminster Hall, on the validity of a surrebutter, was supported by a text from St Paul, or a verse from the Psalms of David. When men are first made to perceive the importance of learning, they dote upon it; and some time must elapse, before they can comprehend that any portion of those stores which are so much better than houses or land, can ever be misplaced or irrelevant. This tinge of barbarity, is by no means discreditable to the intellectual powers, because it is the result of an earnest attachment to literature, acting on a vigorous, but untutored understanding; and it may be justly predicated of the Germans. But the same imperfect perceptions of fitness and propriety, which would have made their works pedantic in the last age, have disfigured them in ours with ostentatious quackery and puling affectation. Erudition is no longer the sole path to distinction, although it continues to be one of the principal highways. We now respect superior intellect, whatever the task may be in which it has chosen to employ itself. Equal honours may be gained by pursuing the most opposite directions-by deep research, or by the most boundless luxuriance of fancy-by bold inquiries into the truth of received opinions, or by vindicating these opinions with conscientious ability. The candidate for fame is at liberty to follow the doctrines of the Academy or the Portico; he may grasp the crown of roses, or aspire to the wreath of immortal bays. But when he has elected his pro vince, he must be content to keep within it: He must not be an Epicurean whilst he bears the staff and wallet of the cynic; nor philosophize with Plato, whilst his brows are encircled with the voluptuous garland. The Germans are perpetually sinning against this plain and obvious precept; each individual labours out of his vocation. The German novellist gives broad hints that he is qualified to hold a disputation in omni scibili et de quolibet ente.'-The German Professor strives to be an amiable. Adonis in his college gown and ruff.-In theology the Germans are all for reason, and will admit nothing but what can be demonstrated. In history and science they are all for faith, and are ready to believe every thing that can be said. The quality which Madame de Stael has termed the poetry of the soul, contributes in seducing them to disobey the warning voice of sober reason; it gives a morbid vivacity to their faculties; it turns them into day-dreamers and visionaries and mystics; and is the chief ingredient of those lamentable characteristics the mingled rant and sickliness of German literature. It is one and the same spirit which successively engaged them in the earnest study of the suns and moons and smaragdine tables of Trismegistus, and the blue griffins and red eagles of Basil Valentine; or set them to ruminate over the interlaced circles and pentagons and cabalistic mottoes of Jacob Behmen, with all the intensity of admiring devotion. And when Kant and his categories succeeded to as much veneration as had been. enjoyed by the chemical monk and the mystical cobler, it is hard to decide whether they gained or lost by the exchange. Even in those pursuits which, from their severe tendency, would seem to exclude its influence, it betrays them into crazy theories and bottomless systems, where the wildest analogies are substituted for facts, and in which the place of argument is held by that species of dexterous combination, which, when properJy applied, constitutes wit, but which, when misapplied, is attributed to a more dangerous infirmity, sometimes suspected to be of kindred descent. Thus, in the infancy of science, old Bombast revealed the astral signatures of plants; and refuted the popular opinions respecting showers of blood, by sagely asserting, that they were only common rain which assumed that colour by passing through the red arch of the rainbow! In the full maturity of knowledge, the same misdirected imaginations have led the countrymen of Haller and Blumenbach to become the enthusiastic auditors of Gall and Spurzheim's craniological lectures. Although we do not go the length of supposing that every breeze which reaches us from the main land of Europe is taint 1 |