In this little volume, however, we have most of Goethe’s successive moods represented by some characteristic utterance,--the young reviewer, the lover of Shakespeare and Gothic art, rebelling against schools and rules but most of all against dullness and formality; the contributor to Wieland’s _German Mercury_, the collaborator of Schiller in the _Horen_ and in an exchange of letters of incomparable interest, after the life of Weimar and the journey to Italy had mellowed his talents; the student of art and æsthetics in the _Propyläen_, championing the antique spirit and voicing a protest against the excesses of romanticism; the more thoughtful but still sympathetic student of Shakespeare, enthusiastic in _Wilhelm Meister_, more temperate in _Shakespeare ad Infinitum_; the mature reviewer, welcoming the publication of old German and foreign folksongs, and hailing in turn Byron, Manzoni, Carlyle, Niebuhr, and all the young French and German writers of his day; and finally, the literary dictator in his old age, as shown in the careless and incessant wisdom of his recorded conversation. We have here, it is true, a very small part of his extraordinary output, but quite enough to form a just judgment of his place among the great critics. In a career so extended and a mind so active and all-embracing we must expect to find inconsistencies and errors of judgment. Some of the ideas in this volume have only an historical interest; a perverse mind might indeed garner from it an anthology of critical errors. It was not these which won for him from so many the title of “supreme critic,” but rather the sanity, insight, and impartiality of his mind and his extraordinary gift for foreseeing the direction of critical thought.