Wieland has evidently studied the attributes of the evil principle; with true German profundity, he has taken their length, and their depth, and their breadth, he has all the devil at his very finger ends, and richly deserves the very splendid silver-gilt horns and tail (manufactured by Rundell and Bridges) presented to him a few nights since by the company at the English Opera-house; presented with a speech from the stage-manager, which, or I have been grossly misinformed, drew tears from the eyes of the very scene-shifters. Can anybody forget Wieland’s devil in the _Daughter of the Danube_? Never was there a more dainty bit of infernal nature. It lives in my mind like one of Hoffman’s tales, a realisation of the hero of the nightmare, a thing in almost horrible affinity with human passions. How he eyed the Naiades, how he laughed and ogled, and faintingly approached, then wandered round the object of his demoniacal affections! And then how he burst into action! How he sprang, and leapt, and whirled, and, chuckling at his own invincible nature, spun like a teetotum at the sword of his baffled assailant! And then his yawn and sneeze! There was absolute poetry in them—the very highest poetry of the ludicrous: a fine imagination to produce such sounds as part of the strange, wild, grotesque phantom—to give it a voice that, when we heard it, we felt to be the only voice such a thing could have. There is fine truth in the devils of Wieland. We feel that they live and have their being in the realms of fancy; they are not stereotype commonplaces, but most rare and delicate monsters, brought from the air, the earth, or the flood; and wherever they are from, bearing in them the finest characteristics of their mysterious and fantastic whereabouts.