_Lilith_, from _Lil_, darkness, is the name of night-monster (translated _screech-owl_ in Isaiah xxxiv. 14), who, under the deceitful form of a beautiful woman, was believed by the Jews to be most injurious to parturient women, and very often to occasion the death of young persons before they were circumcised. Buxtorf, in his Lexicon Talmudicum, gives a tolerably good account of these Hebrew _Lamiæ_; but the most complete and satisfactory information on this, as on all other subjects connected with ancient and modern superstition, is to be found in Horst, _Zauber-Bibliothek_, part vi. pp. 42 and 86. Note XIV. _Proctophantasmist._ It is universally agreed that Nicolai, a noted Berlin publisher, who flourished about the middle and towards the end of the last century, is the person meant here. From his biography by Göcking, he appears to have been a man of remarkable mental activity and considerable literary significance in his day; but, like the Brandenburg sands on which he was located, his ideas seemed to have been somewhat flat and prosaic, and totally inadequate to grasp the significance of the great master spirits of thought, who were now asserting their rightful place on the platform of German literature. Notwithstanding the prosaic character of his mind, he became subject to a disease of seeing apparitions in clear daylight (see Dr. Hibbert's book on apparitions), an abnormal action of the optic nerves, which was cured by the application of leeches to the part of the body on which the unfeathered biped finds it comfortable to sit. Hence the name, from the Greek πρωκτός. Note XV. _Intermezzo._ Most of the puppet personages who pop up in this curious little piece, and explain their own significance in a stanza, may be presumed to be sufficiently familiar to all readers capable of appreciating the mind of a poetical thinker such as Goethe. I confine myself to the few following notes:-- _Embryo-Spirit_.--German "_Geist der sich erst bildet_." A quiz upon young versifiers,--poetlings with whom rhyme and reason are opposite poles. _Orthodox_.--We are indebted to the Fathers of the Church for the pious imagination that the heathen gods were devils. Milton follows the same unfounded idea. The gods of Greece were bad enough; but we need not make them worse than they were. They had their good side too. _Vide_ Schiller's beautiful poem, "The Gods of Greece," which, by the by, Frantz Horn calls "Ein unendlicher Irrthum,"--an infinite error. But a man may admire an Apollo or a Minerva without meaning to be a heathen. _Purists_.--There are "purists" among the German grammarians; but the allusion here must be to something else--prigs and precisians, I fancy. _Xenien_.--Epigrammatic poems published by Goethe and Schiller, which were very severe on the half-poets of the day.