greatest of her poets! May Shakespeare live on in the love of each generation that grows up in England! May the youth of England long continue to be nursed, to be fed, to be reproved and judged by his spirit! With that nation—that truly English, because truly Shakespearian nation—the German nation will always be united by the strongest sympathies; for, superadded to their common blood, their common religion, their common battles and victories, they will always have in Shakespeare a common teacher, a common benefactor, and a common friend. _April, 1864._ XI. BACON IN GERMANY.(35) “If our German philosophy is considered in England and in France as German dreaming, we ought not to render evil for evil, but rather to prove the groundlessness of such accusations by endeavoring ourselves to appreciate, without any prejudice, the philosophers of France and England, such as they are, and doing them that justice which they deserve; especially as, in scientific subjects, injustice means ignorance.” With these words M. Kuno Fischer introduces his work on Bacon to the German public; and what he says is evidently intended, not as an attack upon the conceit of French, and the exclusiveness of English philosophers, but rather as an apology which the author feels that he owes to his own countrymen. It would seem, indeed, as if a German was bound to apologize for treating Bacon as an equal of Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. Bacon’s name is never mentioned by German writers without some proviso that it is only by a great stretch of the meaning of the word, or by courtesy, that he can be called a philosopher. His philosophy, it is maintained, ends where all true philosophy begins; and his style or method has frequently been described as unworthy of a systematic thinker. Spinoza, who has exercised so great an influence on the history of thought in Germany, was among the first who spoke slightingly of the inductive philosopher. When treating of the causes of error, he writes, “What he (Bacon) adduces besides, in order to explain error, can easily be traced back to the Cartesian theory; it is this, that the human will is free and more comprehensive than the understanding, or, as Bacon expresses himself in a more confused manner, in the forty-ninth aphorism, ‘The human understanding is not a pure light, but obscured by the will.’ ” In works on the general history of philosophy, German authors find it difficult to assign any place to Bacon. Sometimes he is classed with the Italian school of natural philosophy, sometimes he is contrasted with Jacob Boehme. He is named as one of the many who helped to deliver mankind from the thralldom of scholasticism. But any account of what he really was, what he did to immortalize his name, and to gain that prominent position among his own countrymen which he has occupied to the present day, we should look for in vain even in the most complete and systematic treatises on the history of philosophy published in Germany.