fight out their battles."[H] It is but too manifest, indeed, according to Schlegel's projection of the universe, that all constitutionalism is, properly speaking, a sort of political Protestantism, a fretful fever of the social body, having its origin (like the religious epidemic of the sixteenth century) in the private conceit of the individual, growing by violence and strife, and ending in dissolution. This is the ever-repeated refrain of his political discourses, puerile enough, it may be, to our rude hearing in Britain, but very grateful to polite and patriotic ears at Vienna, when the cannon of Wagram was yet sounding in audible echo beneath their towers. The propounder of such philosophy had not only the common necessity of all philosophers to pile up his political in majestic consistency with his ecclesiastical creed, but he had also to pay back the mad French liberalism with something more mad if possible, and more despotic. And if also Danton, and Mirabeau, and Robespierre, and other terrible Avatars of the destroying Siva in Paris, had raised his naturally romantic temperament a little into the febrile and delirious now and then, what wonder? Shall the devil walk the public streets at noon day, and men not be afraid? [Footnote H: _Philosophie des Lebens_, p.407.] We said that Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, political and religious, but chiefly religious, was the grand key to his popular work on the history of literature. We may illustrate this now by a few instances. In the first place, the "many-sided" Goethe seems to be as little profound as he is charitable, when he sees nothing in the Sanscrit studies of the romantic brothers but a _pis aller_, and a vulgar ambition to bring forward something new, and make German men stare. We do not answer for the elder brother; but Frederick certainly made the cruise to the east, as Columbus did to the west, from a romantic spirit of adventure. He was not pleased with the old world--he wished to find a new world more to his mind, and, beyond the Indus, he found it. The Hindoos to him were the Greeks of the aboriginal world--"_diese Griechen der Urwelt_"--and so much better and more divine than the western Greeks, as the aboriginal world was better and more divine than that which came after it. If imagination was the prime, the creative faculty in man, here, in the holy Eddas, it had sat throned for thousands of years as high as the Himalayas. If repose was sought for, and rest to the soul from the toil and turmoil of religious wars in Europe, here, in the secret meditations of pious Yooges, waiting to be absorbed into the bosom of Brahma, surely peace was to be found. Take another matter. Why did Frederick Schlegel make so much talk of the middle ages? Why were the times, so dark to others, instinct to him with a steady solar effluence, in comparison of which the boasted enlightenment of these latter days was but as the busy exhibition of squibs by