opinion of ourselves: “Sur toutes sortes de sujets il faut qu’ils se préfèrent au reste du monde.” He thinks Corneille and Molière (whom he would specially avenge) ill-treated by the English dramatists who borrow from them. He accuses Dryden—not by name, but transparently and truly as “the most famous of their poets”—of stealing from Corneille and abusing him; neither of which articles is just. On the other hand, he is certainly too complimentary (though Saint-Evremond[10] was responsible for the exaggeration) in calling Shadwell “_one of_ the most famous” of the same poets; and we may abandon _The Miser_ to his arrows. He admits that our literature outside the theatre is “full of good sense and originality,” but says little about it. He has himself the good sense to object to Louis Quatorze dress, for Romans and Carthaginians, on both stages. [Sidenote: _and to French._] He is much more copious on French Literature; and his judgments here are more interesting, because he is at a more original angle. Much of his outlook is purely Neo-Classic. He has a thorough belief in Kinds; he has abundance to say “in the _aib_stract” about _bon sens_ and _bel esprit_; and for one writing so late he is surprisingly copious on Voiture and Sarrasin and Balzac. He thinks Rabelais quite “beneath humanity,”—having indeed, here and elsewhere, a good deal of solid German morals about him. The most surprising thing is his attitude to Boileau, whom he pronounces to have plenty of sense and art, but no great genius. This attitude, and the taking of English literature into serious literary consideration for almost the first time on the Continent, since Lilius Giraldus,[11] are the things which, from the literary side, deserve most note in Muralt.[12] And the latter—not by any means merely from that point of view of “preferring ourselves to others”—is the most important of all. So long as general critical attention to modern literature was confined to French, Italian, and Spanish, all intimately connected with and indebted to each other, and all descended from Latin, no real “fermentation” could take place. The English yeast set it going at once, in Germany as elsewhere. Muralt, however, was an exceptional and cosmopolitan sort of person, and the note which he sounded was not immediately taken up, though it is very noteworthy that when it was, it was again in Switzerland. [Sidenote: _German Criticism proper._] The account which we gave of German criticism proper before 1700, and of that part of it which belongs to the Neo-Classic dispensation after that date, was avowedly scanty: the reasons for this apparent stinginess being twofold—the comparative paucity of the materials, and even more the comparative unimportance of almost all those that do exist. But we undertook in a manner to make good the seeming slight; and it is our present business to do so.[13] [Sidenote: _A glance backward._]