winter, and they go between coffee and supper in their ordinary clothes. Even in Berlin women do not wear full dress at any theatre. In the little towns you may any evening meet or join the leisurely stream of playgoers, and if you enter the theatre with them you will find that the women leave their hats with an attendant. You are in no danger in Germany of having the whole stage hidden from you by flowers and feathers. Shakespeare is as much played as Goethe and Schiller, and it is most interesting and yet most disappointing to hear the poetry you know line upon line spoken in a foreign tongue. Germans say that their translation is more beautiful and satisfying than the original English; but I actually knew a German who kept Bayard Taylor's _Faust_ by his bedside because he preferred it to Goethe's. I think there is something the matter with people who prefer translated to original poetry, but I will leave a critic of standing to explain what ails them. I have never met a German who would admit that Shakespeare was an Englishman. They say that his birth at Stratford-on-Avon was a little accident, and that he belongs to the world. They say this out of politeness, because what they really believe is that he belongs to Germany, and that as a matter of fact Byron is the only great poet England has ever had. I am not joking. I am not even exaggerating. This is the real opinion of the German man in the street, and it is taught in lessons in literature. An English girl went to one of the best-known teachers in Berlin for lessons in German, and found, as she found elsewhere, that the talk incessantly turned on the crimes of England and the inferiority of England. "You have had two great names," said the teacher,--"two and no more. That is, if one can in any sense of the word call Shakespeare an English name ... Shakespeare and Byron, ... then you have finished. You have never had anyone else, and Shakespeare has always belonged more to us than to you." The English girl gasped, for she knew something of her own literature. "But have you never heard about Chaucer," she asked, "or of the Elizabethans, or of Milton, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth...?" "_Reden Sie nicht, reden Sie nicht!_" cried the teacher,--"I never allow my pupils to argue with me. Shakespeare and Byron ... no, Byron only, ... then England has done." You still find Byron in every German household where English is read at all, and no one seems to have found out what fustian most of his poetry really was. Ruskin and Oscar Wilde are the two popular modern authors, and the novel-reading public chooses, so several booksellers assured me, Marion Crawford and Mrs. Croker. I could not hear a word anywhere of Stevenson or Rudyard Kipling, but I did come across one person who had enjoyed _Richard Feverel_.