his daughter in order to obtain a favourable wind." French readers were accustomed to the superstitions of antiquity, but felt themselves repelled by those of the Middle Ages. And there were, moreover, many who, without reading them, denounced Goethe's works as barbaric literature. As late as 1825 that narrow-minded assailant of the Romanticists, Auger, the secretary of the French Academy, in making an attack on "those lovers of the beauties of nature, who would willingly exchange the Apollo Belvedere for a shapeless image of St. Christopher, and with the greatest pleasure give _Phèdre_ and _Iphigénie_ for _Faust_ and _Götz von Berlichingen_," drew smiles from the Academicians by pronouncing these last titles in a burlesque manner, as if they were barbaric names. The admiration of the Romanticists for _Faust_ was, however, as has already been observed, barren of result. Though Gérard de Nerval translated the First Part to the entire satisfaction of the aged Goethe, and though Delacroix's painting of Faust and Mephistopheles riding through the air was also much admired by the old poet and art connoisseur, the French literature of the period only rarely (as in the case of Quinet) shows any trace of the influence of the great drama. One would have imagined that Schiller, with his association with Rousseau and his flowery dramatic rhetoric, would have appealed more forcibly to Frenchmen than Goethe; as a matter of fact he possessed little attraction for the younger generation. Adaptations of all his plays were indeed performed on the French stage, but this happened just before the formation of the Romantic School proper, and the semi-Romantic poets of the transition period, who cut and carved these plays into conventional tragedies to suit the taste of the day, destroyed them in place of teaching the public to appreciate them. Out of the _Jungfrau von Orleans_ and _Don Carlos_, Soumet manufactured a _Jeanne d'Arc_ and an _Élisabeth de France_; _Fiesco_ was adapted and maltreated by Ancelot, _Wallenstein_ by Liadières; but neither Classicists nor Romanticists derived any satisfaction from the results, and the verdict of the austere Beyle (who read, or tried to read the originals) is that Schiller paid too much homage to the old French taste to be able to present his countrymen with the tragedy which their manners and customs demanded. He has no appreciation whatever of Schiller's real greatness; he evidently knew too little German to be able to enjoy and understand _Wallenstein_; besides, like many of the younger men, he allowed himself to be carried away to such an extent by his desire to annoy the Classicists, that he actually extols Werner's _Luther_ as the modern drama most nearly approaching Shakespeare, and its author as a much greater poet than Schiller.