chosen for treatment, and hence, though none did it consciously, the modes of representation were multiplied; though some were grotesque enough, and many an experiment proved unsuccessful. Without question, Wieland possessed the finest natural gifts of all. He had developed early in those ideal regions in which youth loves to linger; but when so-called experience, contact with the world and women, spoilt his delight in those realms, he turned to the actual, and derived pleasure for himself and others from the conflict between the two worlds, where, in light encounters, half in earnest, half in jest, his talent found fullest scope. How many of his brilliant productions appeared during my student days! _Musarion_ had the greatest effect upon me, and I can yet remember the place and the very spot where I looked at the first proof-sheet, which Oeser showed me. It was here that I seemed to see antiquity living anew before me. Everything that is plastic in Wieland’s genius showed itself here in the highest perfection; and since the Timon-like hero Phanias, after being condemned to unhappy abstinence, is finally reconciled to his mistress and to the world, we may be content to live through the misanthropic epoch with him. For the rest, we were not sorry to recognize in these works a cheerful aversion to exalted sentiments, which are apt to be wrongly applied to life, and then frequently fall under the suspicion of fanaticism. We pardoned the author for pursuing with ridicule what we held to be true and venerable, the more readily, as he thereby showed that he was unable to disregard it. What a miserable reception was accorded such efforts by the criticism of the time may be seen from the first volumes of the _Universal German Library_. Honorable mention is made there of the _Comic Tales_, but there is no trace of any insight into the character of the literary species. The reviewer, like every one at that time, had formed his taste on examples. He never takes into consideration that in criticizing such parodistical works, it is necessary first of all to have the noble, beautiful original before one’s eyes, in order to see whether the parodist has really discovered in it a weak and comical side, whether he has borrowed anything from it, or whether, under the pretense of imitation, he has given us an excellent invention of his own. Of all this there is not a word, but isolated passages in the poems are praised or blamed. The reviewer, as he himself confesses, has marked so much that pleased him, that he cannot quote it all in print. When they go so far as to greet the exceedingly meritorious translation of Shakespeare with the exclamation: “By rights, a man like Shakespeare should not have been translated at all!” it will be understood, without further remark, how immeasurably the _Universal German Library_ was behindhand in matters of taste, and that young people, animated by true feelings, had to look about them for other guiding stars.