‘Egmont’ is an historical play in prose, founded on the _real_ tragedy perpetrated by the bloody Alba, in Belgium. Its most remarkable feature is the unheroic character of Egmont himself. While William of Orange is the common stage hero, patriotic and wise, destined to save his country, Count Egmont is the warm-hearted, sensual, and munificent nobleman, a patriot not from reflection but impulse, whose love for the humble Clara is much more prominent than his patriotism, and who is therefore doomed to perish. The pathos lies in the dissonance between the man and the necessities of his position. Goethe, in drawing such a character, probably thought of Hamlet, of whom he makes an analogous remark. We pass over a number of dramas, all original, all experiments in furtherance of his own studies, and name only ‘Faustus,’ the unique, the undefinable. Begun in youth, continued at intervals during a long life, and finally left unfinished, it has been called a grotesque tragedy. Who knows not the popular legend of the learned magician who sold his soul to the devil? This coarse tale of vulgar superstition is here used as a vehicle into which the adventurous poet has cast all that “Perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.” The erring philosopher is attended on the wrong road by a laughing devil, Mephistophiles, who leads him through scenes of the wildest frolic and the most appalling wretchedness. All that is most deplorable, most frightful in human life, is here displayed with the running comment of the dæmon whom Omnipotence does not confound; and the most awful problems of divinity and moral philosophy are treated with pathetic sadness by the wretched victim, or with infernal satire by his master-slave. These repulsive elements are nevertheless combined with the soothing, not to say sanctifying, influence of a Margaret, a confiding, loving, innocent woman, whose very destruction works on the heart like an act of grace, and prepares the spectator for the promised salvation of her lover. In the romance, as in the drama, Goethe commenced a career which he immediately abandoned. His Werter breathes a spirit of dissatisfaction with the world and its institutions. But by writing that book, which infected the rising generation with the same spirit, he cured himself of the disease; and he then became the declared foe of the sentimental, which he attacked in his romantic comedy, ‘The Triumph of Sentimentality.’