cost of his noblest gifts; he develops his critical faculty at the expense of his imagination; and the divine spark which burns in him is extinguished. Therefore this heavenly messenger ought not to be allowed to degrade himself by common work; his brain is a volcano, from which the "harmonious lava" (_laves harmonieuses_) can only issue when he is in a position to be idle as long as he pleases.[3] There is, as the modern reader sees at once, some truth in this idea, but more exaggeration. The play which was based on it, and which produced floods of tears, appeals so exclusively to the instinct of compassion, that it has no properly tragic effect; and it has too strong a lyric bias in favour of its hero to possess the inward equilibrium without which a drama lacks stability. Chatterton and the young Quakeress whom he loves have appropriated every single noble quality of mind and soul; around them there is nothing but coarseness, cold-heartedness, prose, and stupidity. What we are shown is the cruel treatment of the intellectual genius by the coarse, earth-bound world around him. The view of life is not unlike what we find in Germany in the writings of Novalis, in Denmark in those of Andersen and Ingemann; for authors such as these Goethe has written his _Tasso_ in vain. We in our day are tired of the dramas with artist heroes which were ushered in by Oehlenschläger's _Correggio_, and are represented in Germany by Holtei's _Lorbeerbaum und Bettelstab_, &c. We no longer indignantly sympathise with Chatterton, "the man who has been created to descry in the stars the way pointed out by the finger of the Lord," when he chooses rather to poison himself than accept an unpoetical appointment which would bring him in a hundred a year. In this case also, what touched every heart in an audience of the year 1835, now only elicits a smile and a shrug of the shoulders.