The spirit of the French people resembles the Greek spirit in its absolute freedom from awkwardness, its love of lightness, elegance, form and colour, passion and dramatic life. No reasonable person would dream of ranking the French with the Greeks. The distance between them is so great as to be practically immeasurable. Still one must maintain their right to the place of honour against those who assert that the Germans stand nearer to the Greeks. The Germans who more immediately influenced Mme. de Staël, the leaders of the Romantic School, cherished a firm conviction of the vanity of literary and artistic attempts to reproduce the antique. A. W. Schlegel perpetuated Lessing's antagonism to the so-called classical poetry of France, exalting at its expense the poetry of the Troubadours, which did not depend for support on Greek or Latin literature; and he was very much colder in his criticism of Goethe's neo-Hellenic poems than of those which dealt with more home-like and more varied themes. To such influence is to be ascribed Corinne's dictum (i. 321) that, since we cannot make our own either the religious feelings of the Greeks and Romans or their intellectual tendencies, it is impossible for us to produce anything in their spirit, to invent, so to speak, anything in their domain. We do not need the footnote referring to an essay by Fr. Schlegel to tell us whose suggestion the authoress has here followed. And we almost feel as if we were reading the work of one of the Romantic critics when, in _De l'Allemagne_, we come upon the following development of the same thought: "Even if the artists of our day were restricted to the simplicity of the ancients, it would be impossible for us to attain to the original vigour which distinguishes them, and we should lose that intensity and complexity of emotion which is only found with us. Simplicity in art is apt with us moderns to become coldness and unreality, whereas with the ancients it was full of life."[2] I believe that this utterance hits the mark. And just as the German reproduction of the antique is German, so the Danish renaissance of the antique is Danish and not Greek; that is to say, it is too Danish to be properly Greek, and too Greek to be genuinely Danish and really modern. One is never more conscious of this than when one sees a work of Thorvaldsen's side by side with an antique bas-relief; when, for instance, one compares the Christiansborg medallions with the metopes of the Parthenon, or, as in the Naples Museum, sees a bas-relief of the most vigorous Greek period beside Thorvaldsen's most beautiful bas-relief, his "Night."