the small demand for the collected edition of his works; there was a much better sale for those of his brother-in-law, Vulpius (author of _Rinaldo Rinaldini_). _Tasso_ and _Iphigenia_ could not compete with works of such European fame as Kotzebue's _Menschenhass und Reue_; Goethe himself tells us that they were only performed in Weimar once every three or four years. Clearly enough it was the stupidity of the public which turned the great poets from the popular path to glory; but it is equally clear that the new classicism, which they so greatly favoured, was an ever-increasing cause of their unpopularity. Only two of Goethe's works were distinct successes, _Werther_ and _Hermann und Dorothea_. What were the proceedings of the two great poets after they turned their backs upon their surroundings? Goethe made the story of his own strenuous intellectual development the subject of plastic poetic treatment. But finding it impossible, so long as he absorbed himself in modern humanity, to attain to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks, he began to purge his works of the personal; he composed symbolical poems and allegories, wrote _Die Natürliche Tochter_, in which the characters simply bear the names of their callings, King, Ecclesiastic, &c.; and the neo-classic studies, _Achilleis, Pandora, Palæophron und Neoterpe, Epimenides_, and the _Second Part of Faust_. He began to employ Greek mythology much as it had been employed in French classical literature, namely, as a universally understood metaphorical language. He no longer, as in the _First Part of Faust_, treated the individual as a type, but produced types which were supposed to be individuals. His own _Iphigenia_ was now too modern for him. Ever more marked became that addiction to allegory which led Thorvaldsen too away from life in his art. In his art criticism Goethe persistently maintained that it is not truth to nature, but truth to art which is all-important; he preferred ideal mannerism (such as is to be found in his own drawings preserved in his house in Frankfort) to ungainly but vigorous naturalism. As theatrical director he acted on these same principles; grandeur and dignity were everything to him. He upheld the conventional tragic style of Calderon and Alfieri, Racine and Voltaire. His actors were trained, in the manner of the ancients, to stand like living statues; they were forbidden to turn profile or back to the audience, or to speak up the stage; in some plays, in defiance of the customs of modern mimic art, they wore masks. In spite of public opposition, he put A. W. Schlegel's _Ion_ on the stage--a professedly original play, in reality an unnatural adaptation from Euripides, suggested by _Iphigenia_. Nay, he actually insisted, merely for the sake of exercising the actors in reciting verse, on producing Friedrich Schlegel's _Alarkos_, an utterly worthless piece, which might have been written by a talentless schoolboy, and was certain to be