Playful humour was his, but also that sarcastic wit which stings like a lash, and yet thrills and touches by an indirect appeal to the feelings; his that bitterness of complaint and accusation which assumes the conciliatory form of an attempt to comfort; and that melancholy, which with a smile and a whimsical conceit rises above time and place. But something similar to this might be said of other great humorists. What distinguishes Börne (from Sterne, Jean Paul, and others) is, in the first place, the strength, the violence of the reaction produced in him by all the occurrences of the day which came within the bounds of his horizon. A comparatively trifling incident in real, and especially in public, life is sufficient to set all the chords of his being in vibration. The second peculiarity is that all occurrences directly act upon one and the same point in his spiritual life, that passion for liberty which was born of the keenest sense of justice. One of his critics, Steinthal, explains in a masterly manner the connection between this fact and the fact of his inability to produce a great work. He never thought systematically, never combined with each other all the many things that one after the other occupied and affected his mind, but looked on each separately in its relation to the centre point of his being.[7] His humour brought the miserable reality into juxtaposition with the ideal demand of his intellect; but he gave no picture of the different elements of reality, he merely focussed them. Given such a state of matters, it is easy to understand how inevitable it was, not only that Börne should place Schiller high above Goethe, but also that he should consider Jean Paul to be greatly Schiller's superior. And it is highly characteristic that what he objects to in Schiller is not his purely poetical shortcomings, but his want of moral idealism. We are accustomed to think of Schiller as unassailable on this point, but to Börne's ruthless severity of moral requirement he is not so. Börne's pronouncement on the character of Wilhelm Tell is especially enlightening. To him Tell is nothing but a Philistine-- a good citizen, father, and husband, but a man the essence of whose character is submissiveness. He did not appear at the Rüth, that meeting-place of the elect, to take the oath; he had not the courage to be a conspirator. His words: "Der Starke ist am mächtigsten _allein_"-- (The strong man is strongest alone)