And yet this frankness is, in a manner, his strength. It need not have been so personal, but it is quite indispensable in one who desires to compass not only the tragic, but also the comic hemisphere. And in this quality, and in his many shameless personal attacks, he resembles the greatest comic poet of all times. Towards the end of his _Winter's Tale_, immediately after the wanton passage in which he smells out the future of Germany by putting his head down the opening of Charlemagne's night-throne, he declares that the noblest of the Graces have tuned the strings of his lyre, and that this lyre is the same which was sounded in days gone by, by his father, "the late Aristophanes, the favourite of the Muses," He adds that in his last chapter he has attempted to imitate _The Birds_, "the best of father's dramas." He thus, we observe, prided himself on artistic descent from the greatest comic poet of ancient Greece. For a moment we are taken aback. Other German poets, such as Platen and Prutz, have imitated the form of the Aristophanic comedy, its trimeters, choruses, parabases, the whole of that irregular and yet regular form of art built up by the Greek comic school; but Heine never even made an attempt to master this poetical form, or any other. It is characteristic of him that, persevering and conscientious as he was in ensuring the telling precision of the single metrical or prose expression (I never saw a manuscript with so many corrections as that of his _Atta Troll_, in the Royal Library of Berlin), it was impossible for him to submit to the artistic restriction of any of the great poetic forms. It tallies with this, that in his longer works the plan of the whole is quite vague, but every single line has been gone through again and again. There is probably no exaggeration in saying that he never, in his capacity as an artist, set himself a task and carried it out. Once only he attempted to write a long, connected prose work, a romance or novel. Whether, as some maintain, the greater part of the manuscript was destroyed by a fire, or whether, as I for one believe, the work was never completed, the fact remains that all we have of it is a fragment. And even this fragment, _Der Rabbi von Bacharach,_ is, when carefully examined, nothing but a very much antedated transcription of Heine's own private experiences. Nor did he ever attempt a severely connected metrical composition. His only long poems, _Atta Troll_ and _Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen_ ("Germany, a Winter's Tale"), are irregular, whimsical fantasies, soap-bubbles rocked upon cobweb tissue of the brain, only connected by a uniformity of tone and design.