The English of that period, both in speech and literature, were almost as indifferent to Shakespeare as were the French. This was observed and commented upon in a lively manner, among others by Schlegel, Tieck, Platen and Heine. However, the new methods of German criticism soon made their influence felt in England (Coleridge, Hazlitt), and it seemed to the Germans that these writers had preserved the true tradition of the race and had reillumined the fire that was languishing or had been altogether extinguished among their brethren of the same race, and that they had dissipated the heavy cloud of classical, French and Latin taste, which was hanging over England. To their real merit in recognising the fame of Shakespeare and their profound study of the poet, and to the false interpretation that they gave of these merits by attributing them to the virtue of their race, were added, for well known political reasons, German pride and self-conceit, which did the rest. All the moralising critics, to whom we have referred, were also critics imbued with the German spirit. They united the austere morality, which they discovered in Shakespeare and his heroes, to celebration of the German nature of these qualities and of the poet. They set in opposition the genuine, rude, realistic quality of Shakespeare's poetry, to the artificial, cold, schematic poetry of the Latins. They celebrated the Germanism of a Henry IV (his wild youth is just that of a German youth, says Gervinus; it is the genius of the German race, with its incorruptible health, its strength of marrow, its infinite depths of feeling, beneath a hard and angular exterior, its childlike humility, its wealth of humour, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, says Kreyssig), of a Hamlet (naturally, because he is represented as a student of Wittenberg) and so on, through the Ophelias and the Cordelias, and even the characters of the comedies, such as Benedick and Biron (this last "possessing a character entirely German," "with the harshness of a Saxon," humorous, remote from sentimentality and affectation, and therefore "out of place among the gallantries of Latin society"--all the above is taken from Gervinus). Shakespeare's place "is in the Pantheon of the Germanic people, in the sanctuary richly adorned with all the gods and demons of this race, the most vigorous in life, the best capable of development, the most widely diffused of all races." He stands, either beside Durer and Rembrandt, or on a spur of Parnassus, facing Homer and Aeschylus on another spur, sometimes permitting Dante to stand at his side--Dante was of German origin--, while the impotent crowd of the poets of Latin race seethes at his feet. For Carrière, he is the mouthpiece of the German spirit in England, while for another, he is England's permanent ambassador to Germany, accredited to the whole German people.