threatened to exterminate original authorship in Germany; and in England it was on the point of wholly preventing the translation of German works.

The treaty which enables the author, of either country to reserve to themselves the right of procuring translations of their own works, will make an end with this highly objectionable state of things. By extending the right of literary property, it will be of material service to the writers of original works in England as well as in Germany. In either country it will make speculations in translations profitable to the publisher and remunerative to the translator. And, in conjunction with the copyright treaty, which, as the public papers stated, is about to be concluded with America, this treaty will serve to place British authors generally in a more comfortable and independent position than British authors ever were at any one period of our national literature. When, as will doubtlessly be the case, Austria, and the minor states of Germany, shall have joined the Prussian Convention, an English author will be enabled to dispose of the right of translating any new work of his for a German population exceeding forty millions. He will then make his contract with his publishers, with a view not only to the English market, but to the American market also; and the success of a work will then indeed yield a splendid reward for literary labour. Under the influence of such favourable circumstances we shall, we trust, be at length freed of the miserable cant of the day respecting the claims of literature; and when an English author really and truly disposes of the right of selling his work over two continents and hundreds of millions, we expect that the eyes even of the blindest will be opened to the transparent and disgraceful humbug of Literary Guilds and Museum Institutes for the relief of needy authors. Nothing can be more derogatory to

Bilder und Geschichten aus dem Schwäbischen Leben. Von OTTILIE WILDERMUTH. Stuttgart: Krabbe. London: Williams and Norgate.

THIS is a pleasant and sensible book, containing sketches and tales of Suabian life. The success of Auerbach's "Village Stories may possibly have helped to set Mrs. Wildermuth off writing; but, once at the desk, she forgets all about Auerbach, and his sentimental denizens of the Black Forest. Striking off in a direction of her own, she gives us what she-evidently a pastor's daughter, and probably a pastor's wife-knows, or cares to know, of the manners and customs of Suabia, past and present. Indeed, the past predominates, as more suggestive of "Sketches and Tales than these

the dignity of the literary profession, or tend so much to lower the "fourth estate" in the eyes of the ignorant, prejudiced, and undiscerning, than the attempts which are still making, on various sides, to enlist public sympathy on behalf of the literary men of England, to expose the sufferings of a few of them to the public gaze, to plead their present forlorn condition, and their hopeless future, as an excuse for sending the hat round, and to extol the merits of literature only the more strongly to establish its claims to the public halfpence. It is signi ficant for this movement, that, with a few exceptions of honest though mistaken zeal, it sprung from, and was fostered by, a class of society who have hitherto been distinguished by the reverse of a love of literature. Publishers, who hold that none but " gentlemen" of independent property ought to aspire to the honour of authorship, and that authors should be publishers, and publishers mere commission agents, have been touchingly sentimental on the penniless condition of those who rack their brains for the public good; "gentlemen" who never, perhaps, bought a book, have been zealous in favour of Museum Institutes for needy authors, and they have given their guineas to those needy authors as freely and condescendingly as they gave their guineas to Mrs. Sidney Herbert's distressed needlewomen. It is high time for the Mendicity Society to watch the promoters of these eleemosynary and disgusting agitations. Those who feel an interest in literature, and would benefit it, have an easier and more honourable means. Let them labour to establish and extend the author's right to his property, and let them read. Every reader is a patron of literature, and every shilling which is paid for a book is a reward of literary labour, and the only reward which is not disgraceful either to the giver or the receiver.

dreary days of general enlightenment and civilization. Perhaps there are two opinions on that point: indeed, much as it pains us to say, we should not like to live in Suabia now, but much less should we have liked to have lived there fifty or a hundred years ago, in despite of all Mrs. Wildermuth's eloquence in praise of "auld lang syne." We freely believe that that lady, that her father and mother, her brothers and sisters, her grandfather and grandmother, and her uncles, aunts, and cousins, to the sixtieth degree, were all very respectable, very funny, and very comfortable, even up to the year 1800, when Mrs. Wildermuth was a little girl; but with Schlosser in the one hand, and the Memoirs of the Chevalier de Lang in the other there arises some awkward doubts as

to whether the happiness of the Wildermuth family of pastors, bürgermeisters, and syndics, was indeed "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." We recommend the book -nay, more, we recommend it for family reading; but just for that very reason we warn our readers, that though Mrs. Wildermuth tells what she believes to be the truth, her account is partial, coloured, and not to be relied on. Goodness knows, Suabian life may be trite and tame enough just now, but it certainly was not much livelier and racier fifty years ago, though Mrs. Wildermuth may have possessed either of the two qualities in a higher degree than she did in the year of grace 1852. The chapters treating of the town and country life of old Suabia are quite unique, they are so quaintly and simply penned. The stories of Mrs. Wildermuth's relations and ancestors, too, are perfect mines of sly humour, and the accounts of the family feasts and drinking-bouts are told with a relish which gives us a high opinion of Mrs. Wildermuth's powers of digestion. There is a book of "love stories," too, but they are the most harmless love stories that it ever was our good fortune to meet with. They-to adopt the cant phrase of criticism-contain nothing that can be regarded "as insulting to common sense; nothing to put female delicacy out of countenance.'

Tagebuch aus Languedoc und Provence. MORITZ HARTMANN. Darmstadt: Leske. London: Williams and Norgate. HERR HARTMANN, the author of this Journal from Languedoc and Provence, is a man of great abilities, who, owing to the unfortunate condition of his native country, has for some time past been leading a life of literary vagrancy. A few years ago he passed a couple of months in England, and it is, as we take it, not a slight proof of his sound sense and modesty that he forbore to publish the notes which we are positive he must have taken on the affairs of this country. With nothing to bind him, with no inducement to select England as the place of his temporary residence, Herr Hartmann turned him to the genial air and the luxurious vegetation of Southern France. We dare say he was a gainer by his choice, and we are sure that literature has gained by it. The South of France has been neglected by modern travellers, especially by the Germans. In our literature, indeed, there is no lack of "Summer Tours" and "Journals of Residences," compiled, in the hours between dinner and supper, from notes supplied by Murray's Handbooks, and by a choice selection of tavern-waiters. The writers, whoever they are, shew us the glories of the southern skies "through a glass, darkly:" they blot the most

radiant landscape, they cast a chill on the sunniest spots with the infection of their own dingy gentility. Mr. Reach has indeed, of late months, struck out of the common path; but his "Claret and Olives" bear, nevertheless, a strong impression of modern after-dinner conversation, He tells us of his rambles in the South, but his arms are on the dinner-table, and his legs under it: we smell the curtains, we see the blaze of sea-coal fire, and our propriety is kept up to the mark by the occasional intervention of a fat and solemn butler.

The Germans are even worse off than we are. Their earliest set of Travels into the South of France that obtained any notoriety was written in express imitation of Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," by a man who never travelled in the country he attempted to describe. The Countess Hahn, we believe, has jotted down copious notes of what she saw of Provence through the folds of a green veil and the deep blue of her spectacles. Mr. Venedey, too, passed some time in Marseilles, and wrote letters which informed his German countrymen of that important fact. He drew, moreover, largely on the reminiscences of his school life, and favoured his readers with elaborate accounts of the Roman remains in various parts of Provence.

We object to travellers who roam through the finest countries on the face of the earth only to remind us of the school-room. Roman antiquities are very interesting, no doubt, but we wish to have them in their proper place. If they are only brought in to prove the writer's classical education, we reject the proof as unconclusive, and also as superfluous. Every writer, now-a-days, is presumed to be a classical scholar, until he blunders out a proof to the contrary. And the collection of a certain number of notes on baths, camps, aqueducts, and arches, can at this time of day impose upon no one; for the appropriating propensities of antiquarians are well known, and justly appreciated. As for the classical travellers in France and Italy, they all steal from one another, or from Murray's Handbooks-the sure sources of comfort for the poor in spirit.

The Journey in the South of France which we should like to read, remains yet to be written. It is not an antiquarian disquisition under the treacherous title of a "Summer Tour." It is not a "Ramble," cramming thousands of miles of railway and river into the last fortnight of the long vacation. It is not the "doing" of an old town, in the course of a forenoon, or accounts of the traveller's being "done" by his landlord in the course of the afternoon, which we-the public-demand at the hands of those who pretend to take the road for our benefit. Tied down, as we are,

to the office-stool or the counter; compelled to gasp away our summer on the hot flag-stones of the London pavements, with breweries steaming around us, and sewers reeking under us; bound hand and foot, and given up to wet pavements, muddy streets, drenching rains, chilling winds, close parlours, smoky chimneys, and the dull, leaden, hopeless grey of a wintry sky; poisoned as we are, from day to day, with chalk, alum, sugar of lead, verdigris, and red ochre, we desire that a traveller should take us by the hands, and transport us to more genial climes, that he, for a moment, should delude us with mirage of a happier and less artificial existence. When our feet are on the fender, and our form is reclining on an easy chair, with the fire crackling in front, and the tea-urn simmering behind us, we desire, for the nonce, to forget fender, chair, fire, tea-urn, and all, for a passing glance, a faint odour only, of those blessed regions where existence is bearable without so multitudinous an array of complicated appliances. We ask but to bask one short hour in the summer sun of Provence. We would, but for a moment, be made to believe that the fresh breeze from the southern sea sweeps against our town-worn frame; we would hear the deep rustling of the forests, listen to the distant baying of wolf-hounds, and smell the wild perfume of the meadows. Our eyes are weary with looking on brick and mortar: they ache for the shadows of the woodland and the green of the grass. We are utterly disgusted with drawing-room faces and dinner dresses; we do not believe in black cloth suits and white ties; we are altogether weary of lace-tuckers, thin waists, satin slippers, puffed-out dresses, and conventional nudities. We have lost all patience with bouquets, and care not even for a white camelia in a head of black hair. We would for once see men and women who are not formed after the image of a lay-figure in Mademoiselle Victorini's backparlour; men and women who have no ambition to resemble the newest Paris dolls, and who never thought or dreamt of the existence of such abominations. We would see their sunburnt faces, their free and powerful movements, and the rude taste and naïve ornaments of their dress. We would watch their abundant meals of uncontaminated food; we would close our eyes in the deep, breezy, starry night, which settles round their rude dwellings. In short, we want a friend who can do for us on paper what Claude achieved on canvas; who will give us shady wood, deep vistas, fresh springs of water, glassy lakes, Roman ruins, brown bold men and women, all bathed in sunlight.

Herr Hartmann does not fulfil the conditions of such an ideal tour in the South; still he

works in that direction. He cannot, unfortu nately, forget that he has sat on the forms of a German "gymnasium," and he thinks by far more of Virgil and Homer, than can be agreeable to the reader who is not a schoolmaster. He has also a disagreeable tendency to believe the sectarian wars of the Camisards must be of general interest to the majority of the public. We should be glad if we could purge his mind of this dangerous error. As a matter of history, the Wars of the Camisards are no doubt very interesting; and if Herr Hartmann chooses to make them the subject of a historical work, we are sure such work will be creditable to him, and instructive to his readers. But when he pretends to give us his travelling impressions in the South of France, he ought not to cram his chapters with matters copied from musty memoirs and chronicles, which we are certain he did not read among the vines of Languedoc or the olive groves of Provence, and which, after all, any one who cares for the subject may read up in the libraries of Paris, Vienna, or Berlin, or-if there were a catalogue-even in our own British Museum. We would direct the attention of Herr Hartmann, and of the hundreds of travellers who are worse than he, to the pictures of Claude. Few of them are without some fragments of antique masonry; but Claude does not profess to fill his pictures with temples and arches. He makes them but the foil of his glorious sunlight, luscious vegetation, and of the life of enjoyment which speaks from the faces of all the living figures on his canvas. The past were nothing without the present, and the present exists through, but not for, the past. The sunshine of to-day is worth all the glories of suns that have set, and we look back only to enjoy the pleasure of looking forward. These are epicurean maxims; but even epicurean maxims may be excellent in their place. We recommend them to Herr Hartmann, and to those of our authors who propose to make summer tours for themselves, and descriptions of them for the million.

Belletristische Schriften. Von FR. KUGLER. Vol. i. to viii. Stuttgart: Ebner and Seubert. London: Williams and Norgate.

Or these volumes we can only say, that they are reprinted from Professor Kugler's earlier contributions to the German periodicals. Whether or not those periodicals would not have been all the more prosperous without the artistic tales and novellettes which Professor Kugler contributed, is a question for their editors and publishers. But few of those that read these productions in their present form, will disagree with us, when we say that their republication was superfluous and uncalled for. Not, indeed,

that Professor Kugler's Art-Novels " are bad of their kind." They are at the least quite as good as the writings of a similar character which have been given to the Germans by Tiek, Johanna Schopenhauer, and, of late years, by the two Kinkels. Such productions never rise above a certain level, and in a very few cases only do they fall beneath it. They are, for the most part, indifferently tedious, but they are very much affected by German writers and readers, because they are something else than mere novels." We trust it will take a long time to give the British public a taste for this style of writing.

66

Einleitung in die Geschichte des 19ten Jahrhunderts. Von G. GERVINUS. Leipzig: Engelman. London: Williams and Norgate. THIS book has a history of its own. Professor Gervinus, long known to and revered by the Germans as the author of the best history of their poetical literature, and scarcely less known in England through his elaborate and voluminous work on Shakspeare, took, in 1846, a lead ing part in that unfortunate controversy on the merits of the Schleswig-Holstein question, which the Prussian Court gave up to public discussion for the purpose of staving off internal reform. Introduced, in this manner, to the charms and the dangers of political controversy, among a nation which of all others, and with strange inconsistency, reveres, and at the same time contemns, political writers, Professor Gervinus founded a newspaper, "Die Deutsche Zeitung," which he in the first instance published at Heidelberg, and subsequently at Frankfort. After the revolution of 1848, the learned Professor was elected to serve in the German Parliament, for the express purpose, as the cant of the day went, of framing a Constitution for "the great, united, and free Germany." The result of that preposterous attempt is on record. Suffice it to say, that the Constitution went the way of all waste paper; that the "Deutsche Zeitung" died of its own incapacity and the Professor's heavy leaders; and that Gervinus returned to Heidelberg to lecture on literature, and mourn the vanity of all human projects and aspirations. As a thinking man, and that man a Teuton, he was by no means satisfied with the simple fact, that the German movement had failed, unless he knew why it could not have succeeded? That it could not have succeeded, was incontestably proved by its want of success. For surely a movement which was guided by all the chief philologers, philosophers, and doctors of medicine of all the German universities, could not but command the most brilliant success, if, indeed, success had been at all possible. That is a selfevident proposition, and to doubt it is an act of

high treason against the majesty of the "German Mind" a crime which, we sincerely trust, none of our readers will ever commit.

man.

To find out the real reasons of the fiasco the German revolution made, is by no means an easy matter he who would undertake it must be deeply read, and well up in all the systems of philosophy. An ordinary man, indeed, might be inclined to think that the reasons why the Germans are again enslaved are on the surface of the events of the last years. An ordinary man would have looked for them at home. But a German professor is never at any time an ordinary To lay his hand on any thing within the reach of an ordinary mind, is altogether unworthy of his "scientific cultivation." He goes at once to the bottom. To explain the events which came off within his sight and hearing, he flies off in a tangent to the darkest ages of Hellenic and Teutonic antiquity; and the transactions in which he has been concerned are meaningless to him, unless they are contemplated by the light of analogies, and through a Greek medium. Hence it occurred to Professor Gervinus, that the readiest and simplest means of explaining why the Frankfort Parliament and the "Deutsche Zeitung" failed to work the regeneration of Germany, would be to write a history of the German nation from the Congress of Vienna to the year 1850; and in order to proceed methodically, and to obtain for his important resolution all the publicity which it deserves, he wrote and published a preface, before one line of the first volume of the History of the 19th Century was put on paper. His reasons for so doing were obvious. First, there were some convevenient "friends" in the way, who insisted on the publication; and to resist the solicitations of friends in such matters would have been clearly against the most approved precedents. Second, the preface was large, and the first unwritten volume of the History was also large to delay the publication of the preface, and to print it with the first volume, whenever that first volume shall have been written, will make the book too bulky. And as a third consideration, it was urged that the preface would "establish confidence in the future, create faith in the present, and prepare an asylum to many of those who are wrecked by the storms of the time." Such was the opinion of men whom Professor Gervinus was "in duty bound to respect," and, obedient to this duty, he accomplished the very difficult feat of "silencing his modesty." "For," says he, while modesty is in a state of profound silence, "if my publication could but accomplish that object in the slightest degree, there would indeed be cause to regret every day which is lost before its publication." We are further informed, that

"the historical contemplation of the world," has in these latter days been of great use to Professor Gervinus. It has, at any early period, "cut off those hotblooded expectations" which moved the minds of others, by which means he has been spared many disappointments. All this is very satisfactory, no doubt, but we cannot understand why the learned man's "historical contemplation of the world" should have silenced his modesty to the extent of making him believe that a couple of hundreds of pages of prefatial matter, of which he himself says that it contains "nothing new," could be of service to any one, or that to delay the publication of what is "generally known, generally accepted, and not to be contradicted," would be doing grievous wrong to a suffering public. We have no patience with literary coquetry. If Professor Gervinus would be an historian, he ought, in the first instance, to know the truth, and, knowing it, he ought to speak it even about himself and his motives. The truth, then, as regards this publication, is, that its very learned and ponderous author thought it high time that the world should hear from him. It had almost forgotten his existence, and the seasons came and went, and people married, and were given in marriage, without any one stopping to ask what Professor Gervinus thought about it. In France, Louis Napoleon made his coup d'état; in England, the Russellites went out, and the Derbyites came in; there was an insurrection in China, and wars in Burmah and at the Cape; new diggings and new planets were every day discovered; and all this came to pass without the slightest reference to Professor Gervinus! Such a state of things was clearly not to be endured! The Professor's friends were made to speak, and his modesty was made to hold its tongue, while he rushed into print, and published a Preface, the chief trait of which is its utter want of novelty.

It may be asked, why we devote so much space and attention to so insignificant a production? To this we reply, that we do so very much against our own inclination. But it so happens, that the "Preface" in question is the leading German book of the quarter, not, indeed, from any merits of its own, but through a concourse of adventitious circumstances. The Government of Baden has taken umbrage at the Professor's manifesto; it has stopped the circulation of the book, and arraigned its author on a charge of high treason. Most other German Governments have done the same, at least as far as regards the book; and the police measures thus wisely taken have been duly announced by the great journals of all countries. Public attention in this country, too, has been directed to the Professor and his

Introduction to the History of the 19th Century; and our compassion, though not our astonishment, has been excited by the announcement that an English translation is in the press, and will appear forthwith. We should but ill perform our duty, if, under such circumstances, we neglected to give a full and emphatic expression to our opinion. Thus much do we owe to our own public; but we owe it not less to the Germans to say, that even they would not for one moment have been mistaken as to the merits of Professor Gervinus's last production, had it not been for the blundering rigour of the Baden police. We make but one extract, containing the learned Professor's resumé of the Preface, and his abstract of

THE FUTURE OF GERMANY.

The history of Germany, since the Reformation, has had the same regular, but a slower progress, as the history of England and France. From religious liberty (the period of the last century), it has led us to the threshold Reformation), and from spiritual liberty (the literary of political liberty; and we have reason to hope that we shall attain this political liberty also, and in a degree which answers to the extensive preparations we have made for it. And whenever we contemplate the total and complete course of German history from its first beginnings, comparing it with the history of other nations, such a review must certainly serve to encourage us still further. England, as we said before, passed through the parable perfection, but the same appears to be the case in various phases of historical developement with incomGermany, only the manner is different. The AngloSaxon period of patriarchal royalty we mentioned as rich and important beyond all others; but if we look for an analogous period in our own history, and take the history of Germany to the Hohenstaufen, so long as the imperial power was one of some importance, we shall find in comparison, that this latter period is still more rich, great, and glorious. We found the aristocracy of England more politically able (Staatsfähiger) than any other aristocracy; public peace, which in other countries the one absolute but the German aristocracy, whose chiefs preserved the prince was compelled to defend against the heads of that aristocracy, shewed its political ability in a different manner, and at the same time it displayed by far more energy than any other aristocracy. The English absolutism in a strangely favoured homogenous (?) state, wrought much good, and did little harm: in divided Germany, absolutism did less good, but also less harm. These elements have not in Germany, as they did in England, become amalgamated into a single political organization: the aristocracy emasculated the empire, and all but annihilated it. If-as after the imperial came the aristocratic period-the aristocratic order of things in Germany can be followed by a democratic organization, without the intervention of too violent and exhausting revolutions, then will Germany continue her history with enviable security and modest grandeur. Among our divided people, and one unaccustomed to action, such a process, if at all possible, will certainly be slow, amidst relapses and disappointments, scarcely without foreign assistance, and certainly not without the accidental favour of times and circumstances. But whenever the process shall have been completed, (and much is to be hoped of the people's tough and healthy nature,) then will Germany be to Europe what France has hitherto been. In such a case, the part of a conquering state, as England is. The object of her policy would be to dissolve all the dangerous

she would be as little able, and still less inclined, to act