Great though Schiller and Goethe were, they did not find sufficient support among those who should have been their first followers and disciples. The men of literary callings, who should be the priests of the holiest interests of humanity, were too envious fully to recognize and acknowledge the merit of these two great poet-thinkers. Moreover, the men of letters were chiefly enamoured of their own traditional methods of literary production and could not appreciate the purity, the grandeur, and the holiness of the new taste. They misunderstood the progressive spirit of the time, and to their puny minds the rise of the new era appeared as a mere disturbance of their traditional habits. They looked upon the twin giants of the world of thought as usurpers, who from personal vanity and ambition tyrannized over all others, and whose impositions had either to be resisted, or silenced by shrugs. On the one side, the orthodox and narrow-minded pietists considered Goethe and Schiller irreligious and un-Christian, and accused them of paganism. On the other side we find the two great poets opposed by such men as the shallow Nicolai, a man of good common sense but without any genius, a man who preached that stale kind of rationalism which consisted in both the suppression of all higher aspiration and the denial of spirituality in any sense. He railed at Goethe and Schiller as well as at Kant, Fichte, and other great minds of his time who went beyond his depth and were incomprehensible to him. The pious are characterized in the Xenions as enthusiasts and sentimentalists (_Schwärmer_) while the prosaic rationalists are called by the German student term “philistines” which denotes common-place people, and the pedantic Nicolai figures as the “arch-philistine.” Nicolai was a rich and influential publisher in Berlin; he was an author himself, and a very prolific one too, but his writings are superficial and barren. On several occasions he criticised Goethe severely, and our great poets asserted that in fighting superstition he attacked poetry, and in attempting to suppress the belief in _spirits_ he also tried to abolish _spirit_. So Goethe makes him say in the _Walpurgisnacht_: “Ich sag’s Euch _Geistern_ in’s Gesicht, Den _Geistes_-Despotismus leid ich nicht; Mein Geist kann ihn nicht exerciren.” [I tell you, spirits, to your face, I give to spirit-despotism no place; My spirit cannot practise it at all.] _Tr. by Bayard Taylor._ The irritation of the literary dwarfs showed itself in malevolent reviews of Schiller’s literary enterprise, _Die Horen_. Schiller wrote to Goethe June 15, 1795: