The Dramaturgie has long fulfilled its object, and almost outlived its interest. To the English reader there can be no interest in wading through critiques on German plays, and German actors no longer known; nor can there be much attraction in witnessing the assault upon a tragic system which no living Eng. lishman would pronounce a model. For our own parts we think Lessing unjustly severe on the French poets; and not at all willing to admit their peculiar merits. The critic, however, cannot glance over the Dramaturgie without profit; and scholars no less than critics will do well to read his discussion of Aristotle's definition of Tragedy.

Perhaps the characteristics of Lessing's mind are nowhere more distinctly visible than in his treatise on the Laokoon. The clearness and the directness of the style, are qualities so rare in such works, that one is apt to think lightly of its ideas; a journey, so easily performed, does not seem difficult; ideas, so easily grasped, seem obvious. But, on closing the book, if you compare the state of your opinions on art with those entertained previous to the perusal, you will be able to estimate its value. We have heard very eminent men declare, that it taught them more about art than all the other works they had read upon the subject put together. It is a book essentially instructive. The admirable analytical sagacity with which the boundaries of each art are distinguished, opens a vast field of criticism. The clear and piercing glance thrown upon the fog and vapour of critical prejudice, has the aid of keen wit and apposite learning in the demolition of grave absurdities. The book is made up of digres sions; and yet these digressions are so well planned as to form constituent parts. He tacks away from the port, only to fill his sails with wind. He gains the summit of a mountain by winding round it, where direct ascent would be impracticable.

There is another little treatise which may be read in conjunction with the Laokoon, entitled Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet. It contains much curious matter, and satisfactorily establishes the fact of death never having been represented as a skeleton by the ancients: whenever a skeleton is represented, it means a larva, not death. Death was held to be the brother of sleep; and, like sleep, was depicted with wings, the feet crossed. He held a torch reversed, and a chaplet of flowers. He was always. a young man. It is a mistake to suppose that all young figures with wings meant Cupids. There is a great deal of discussion, philological and critical, in this Essay; but Lessing had, above all men, the art of making such discussions amusing. Moreover, he has enlivened it with vivacious polemics. But as a specimen of how he handled an adversary, his Vade Mecum

für den Herrn Lange should be consulted. Herr Lange, a poet of some celebrity in those days, had translated Horace. Lessing criticized this translation in a letter to a friend. The letter got into the Newspapers. Lange, furious, replied in a fiery pamphlet, accusing Lessing of ignorance, of misrepresentation, of envy, of malice. Lessing was not the man to let such an opportunity slip. He dearly loved a taste of fighting.' It was wine to him. He replied in this Vade Mecum-a remarkable specimen of acute criticism, minute scholarship, and galling banter. While thus with Horace, the reader will do well to give his attention to the Rettungen des Horaz. In this Essay, Lessing undertakes to clear Horace from the charges of cowardice and licentiousness. It is paradoxical, but ingenious; and exhibits his usual amazing power of bringing remote passages to bear upon his argument. The same quality is visible in his Life of Sophocles; which still remains the best biography of that poet.

There is a peculiarity in these, which distinguishes them from all similar works. We allude to the supreme contempt of their learned author for learning. He, of whom it was said that he had read every thing worth reading, who knew every edition of the classics, and every modern work relating to them, was as completely independent of the trammels of authority, and of the prejudices of a book-devourer, as the most confident of unlettered thinkers. If he cites authorities,' is is merely to oppose them to the authorities' of some pedant whom he is chastising: willing as he is to meet an antagonist on any ground, and with any weapons, he escapes the reproach of inconsiderate levity, by showing that he is as familiar with texts and commentaries as any professor, without also being a slave to them.

The Wolfenbüttel Fragments made a great noise at the time; but the interest has now almost entirely passed away. Lessing's share in the controversy was valiantly and honourably borne. Those who wish to study the art of controversy,' as Gibbon studied it in Pascal, may do so in this portion of Lessing's writings; no one else will find them palatable. The Education of the Human Race has had the very questionable honour of having been translated and adopted by the St Simonians, and by les Humanitaires; but in a sense which Lessing himself would have strongly repelled. Indeed, it is worthy of remark, that with so logical a mind, and with such strong philosophical tendencies, Lessing never gave himself up to what the Germans call Metaphysics. Many a worthy German has deplored that he did not give the world his solution of the problem of Seyn und Denken, and did not venture on the apodictic certainty of the absolute! To us this is but one of the many evidences of his clear

and practical mind. He was fond of speculation; but speculation about subjects unintelligible or beyond the reach of human cognizance, was too frivolous for him. Until his countrymen learn to think with him on this subject, they will never be able to imitate the good example he set them.

We shall here close this brief and rapid sketch of the characteristics of German Literature, and more particularly of the very eminent German writer before us. For dissent we are at

all times prepared, but we have here, we suspect, to fear that our opinions may occasionally give offence, by us far from intended; for we have no interest, near or remote, in the subject, but that of truth and free enquiry; and we readily give up these opinions to be canvassed with the same freedom we have used in detailing them.

ART. VII.-Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil. By N. P. F. WILLIS. 3 vols. 8vo. London: 1845.

W HATEVER doubt or surprise the details and extracts with which we are about to amuse our readers, may seem to attach to the fact, we beg to assure those of them who do not already know it, that Mr Willis has actually written some rather clever books, occasionally marked by traits of genius. But, with respect to the present publication, we confess we have been frequently at a loss to judge whether his narratives were intended to be taken as serious, or only jocular-as what he himself believed to be truths, or intended only as amusing fancies. True, he writes, as he tells us, with a free pencil;' but it also is true that he writes as if he wished his readers to think that he is perfectly in earnest; that he speaks in his own proper person, and reveals his own adventures, or what he appears to wish to be taken as such; and we therefore feel it to be quite fair-indeed that we are bound-to take him at his word, and to deal with him accordingly.

The history of these Dashes at Life,' which some of our contemporaries have much extolled, is thus modestly given in the preface: Like the sculptor who made toys of the frag'ments of his unsaleable Jupiter, the author, in the following col⚫lection of brief tales, gives material, that, but for a single objection, would have been moulded into works of larger design. • That objection is the unmarketableness of American books in America, owing to our (Mr Willis is an American) defective

law of copyright.' And he proceeds to show, with pathetic accuracy, that as an American publisher can get all English books for nothing, he will not throw away his money on American writers: hence the only chance of a livelihood for the latter, is to contribute to periodical literature, and to transport works of bulk and merit to the English market.

So, after all, if a few authors and publishers grumble at piracy, the public gains. But for the pirates of New York and Boston, we should never have had Mr Willis's Dashes.' And though the genius which might have perfected the Jupiter, has been thus partly balked-though Mr Willis has been forced to fritter away his marble and intellect in a commerce of toys; still the fragmented Jupiter has, with the frieze of the Parthenon, found an appropriate locality in the capital of the world.

But, to proceed with the history, we may state that it was Mr Willis's intention to work up some of these sketches into substantive Novels, but for the unsatisfactory state of the market for that commodity; and there can be no sort of doubt, that the genius which conceived, might have enlarged the 'Dashes' to any size. In the first half of these volumes, there are some twenty tales illustrative of English and Continental life-true copies, Mr Willis states, of what he had seen there; and most of them of so strange and diverting a nature, that a man of genius might have made many scores of volumes out of the adventures recorded in only a few hundreds of these duodecimo pages. The Americans, by their piratical system, have robbed themselves of that pleasure; and the Union might have had a novelist as prolific as M. Dumas or Mr James, had it possessed the common generosity to pay him.

The European, as contradistinguished from the American views of society, we take to be by far the most notable of the Dashes.' The judgment of foreigners has been called, by a happy blunder of logic, that of contemporary posterity. In Mr Willis we have a republican visiting a monarchical country for 'the first time, traversing the barrier of different ranks with a 'stranger's privilege, and curious to know how nature's nobility holds its own against nobility by inheritance, and how heart ' and judgment were modified in their action by the thin air at the summit of refinement.' That Mr Willis, in this exalted sphere, should have got on in a manner satisfactory to himself, is no wonder. Don Christopher Sly conducted himself, we all remember, with perfect ease in the Ducal chair. Another personage of somewhat humble rank in life, was, as we also know, quite at home at the court of Queen Titania, and inspired her Majesty with a remarkable passion. So also our republican

stranger appears to have been equally at his ease, when he appeared for the first time in European aristocratical society.

The great characteristic of high society in England, Mr Willis assures us, is admiration of literary talent. At the summit of refinement,' a natural nobleman, or a popular writer for the Magazines, is in all respects the equal of a Duke. As some captain of Free Lances of former days, elbowed his way through royal palaces, with the eyes of all womankind after him—so in the present time a man, by being a famous Free Pencil, may achieve a similar distinction. Of such a champion, the ladies don't say as in the times of the Free Lances, he fought at Hennebon or Pavia, but that he wrote that charming poem in Colburn, that famous article in Blackwood. Before that title to fame, all aristocratic heads bow down. The ladies do not care for rank, or marry for wealth-they only worship genius!

This truly surprising truth forms the text of almost every one of Mr Willis's Dashes' at English and Continental life. The heroes of the tales are all more or less alike-all' Free Pencils." Sometimes the tales are related in the first person, as befalling our American; sometimes a flimsy third person veils the author, but you can't but see that it is Cæsar who is writing his own British or Gallic victories, for the 'Free Pencil,' always conquers. Duchesses pine for his love; modest virgins go into consumptions and die for him; old grandmothers of sixty forget their families and propriety, and fall on the neck of this Free Pencil.' If this be true, it is wonderful; if it is fiction, it is more wonderful still, that all a man's delusions should take this queer turnthat Alnaschar should be always courting the Vizier's daughter -courting! what do we say? it is the woe-worn creature who is always at Alnaschar's feet, and he (in his vision) who is kicking her.

The first of the pictures of London life is called 'Leaves from the Heart-book of Ernest Clay.' This, but for the unfavourable circumstances before alluded to, was to have been a novel of three volumes; and indeed it would have been hard to crowd such a hero's amours into a few chapters. Ernest is a great Free Pencil,' with whom Jules Janin himself (that famous chieftain of the French Free Pencils,' who translated Sterne, confessing that he did not know a word of English, and did' his own wedding-day in a feuilleton of the Journal des Débats) can scarcely compare. The Heart-book' opens in Ernest's lodgings, in a second floor front, No. -, South Audley Street, Grosvenor Square,' where Ernest is writing, before a three-halfpenny inkstand, an article for the next New Monthly Magazine. It was two o'clock, and the author was at breakfast-and to show what