My object in taking this rapid survey of German literature has been to show that the extracts which I have collected in my “German Classics” have not been chosen at random, and that, if properly used, they can be read as a running commentary on the political and social history of Germany. The history of literature is but an applied history of civilization. As in the history of civilization we watch the play of the three constituent classes of society,—clergy, nobility, and commoners,—we can see, in the history of literature, how that class which is supreme politically shows for the time being its supremacy in the literary productions of the age, and impresses its mark on the works of poets and philosophers. Speaking very generally, we might say that, during the first period of German history, the really moving, civilizing, and ruling class was the clergy; and in the whole of German literature, nearly to the time of the Crusades, the clerical element predominates. The second period is marked by the Crusades, and the triumph of Teutonic and Romantic chivalry, and the literature of that period is of a strictly correspondent tone. After the Crusades, and during the political anarchy that followed, the sole principle of order and progress is found in the towns, and in the towns the poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries finds its new home. At last, at the time of the Reformation, when the political life of the country assumed for a time a national character, German literature also is for a short time national. The hopes, however, which had been raised of a national policy and of a national literature were soon blighted, and, from the Thirty Years’ War to the present day, the inheritance of the nation has been divided between princes and professors. There have been moments when the princes had to appeal to the nation at large, and to forget for a while their royal pretensions; and these times of national enthusiasm, as during the wars of Frederick the Great, and during the wars against Napoleon, have not failed to tell on the literature of Germany. They produced a national spirit, free from professorial narrowness, such as we find in the writings of Lessing and Fichte. But with the exception of these short lucid intervals, Germany has always been under the absolute despotism of a number of small sovereigns and great professors, and her literature has been throughout in the hands of court poets and academic critics. Klopstock, Lessing, and Schiller are most free from either influence, and most impressed with the duties which a poet owes, before all, to the nation to which he belongs. Klopstock’s national enthusiasm borders sometimes on the fantastic; for, as his own times could not inspire him, he borrowed the themes of his national panegyrics from the distant past of Arminius and the German bards. Lessing looked more to his own age, but he looked in vain for national heroes. “Pity the