attempt to teach anything and dwell upon everything which Goethe disregards, adventure, surprise, costume, it began to produce its effect among us when the influence of the Waverley Novel was exhausted. The idea now prevalent, which gives to the novel a practical as well as an artistic side, the idea which prompts us, when we wish to preach any kind of social or moral reform, to write a novel about it, seems to have made way chiefly through Goethe’s authority. But the substance of “Wilhelm Meister” is even more important than the form. It presents the whole subject of morality under a new light, and as in this respect it is only the fullest of a number of utterances to the same effect made by Goethe, it can never be fully appreciated when it is considered by itself, but must be judged in the closest connection with his other works and with his life. Every attempt to treat such a subject as morality in an original manner has something alarming about it. Such attempts ought to be laid only before minds strong enough to consider them calmly, and yet of necessity they come to the knowledge of “the weak brethren,” who are frightened or unsettled by them. Moreover, such attempts are always likely to be one-sided. As it is usually an intense perception of something overlooked into the orthodox morality that prompts them, the innovator is apt to be hurried into the opposite extreme, and to overlook in his turn what the orthodox morality has taught rightly. Goethe laid himself open to the charge of immorality. “Wilhelm Meister” was received with horror by the religious world; it was, if I remember right, publicly burnt by Count Stolberg. In England, Wordsworth spoke of it with disgust, and it still remains the book which chiefly justifies the profound distrust and aversion with which Goethe has been and is regarded among those who are Christian either in the dogmatic or in the larger sense. Not unnaturally it must be confessed.