At the commencement of the present century, amid the storms of war, German taste took a fresh bias. French frivolity had increased immorality to a degree hitherto unknown. Licentiousness reigned unrestrained on the stage and pervaded the lighter productions of the day. If Iffland had, not unsuccessfully, represented the honest citizens and peasantry of Germany struggling against the unnatural customs of modern public life, Augustus von Kotzebue, who, after him, ruled the German stage, sought, on the contrary, to render honor despicable and to encourage the license of the day. In the numerous romances, a tone of lewd sentimentality took the place of the strict propriety for which they had formerly been remarkable, and the general diffusion of these immoral productions, among which the romances of Lafontaine may be more particularly mentioned, contributed in no slight degree to the moral perversion of the age. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter stands completely alone. He shared the weaknesses of his times, which, like Goethe and Kotzebue, he both admired and ridiculed, passing with extraordinary versatility, almost in the same breath, from the most moving pathos to the bitterest satire. His clever but too deeply metaphysical romances are not only full of domestic sentimentality and domestic scenes, but they also imitate the over-refinement and effeminacy of Goethe, and yet his sound understanding and warm patriotic feelings led him to condemn all the artificial follies of fashion, all that was unnatural as well as all that was unjust.