appropriately terminates the collection of his poems in two volumes, we will venture to render in prose, as most expressive of the sort of philosophic resignation to which he at length brought himself at the close of the century. “Two mighty nations are wrestling for the sole possession of the world. To annihilate freedom in every country, they wield the trident and the thunderbolt. To them every land must pay tribute. The Gaul, like Brennus, throws his iron sword into the scale of justice, and the Briton greedily stretches out his polypus arms on every side, and will shut up the free realm of Amphitrite, as if it were his own mansion.... Into the still and sacred recesses of the heart you must fly from the pressure of life. Freedom is only in the realm of dreams, and the beautiful blooms only in song.” But it was not as a lyric poet that Schiller exercised the widest influence over his countrymen. It was in the more popular form of the drama, to which perhaps his genius was less adapted, that he sought and acquired a fame that has already reached the utmost limits of European civilization. His dramatic works fill seven volumes. Not to repeat our remarks on the three juvenile prose tragedies, and on Don Carlos and Wallenstein, we proceed to enumerate the master-pieces which he produced during the last years of his life; but we must, for want of space, pass over unnoticed his less successful attempts at comedy, his translations of Shakspeare’s Macbeth, Racine’s Phaedra, and Gozzi’s Turandot; and his labours on the works of other authors. The result of these, his various studies, was the production of a form of tragedy, which, to be fairly appreciated, must be compared with the French, not the English, drama: for Schiller stands at an immeasurable distance, not merely from Shakspeare, but from the great body of the romantic dramatists of the English and Spanish schools, in whom are to be found either profound development of character, or elaborate skill in the entanglement and management of incident. Schiller has however, on the other hand, enhanced the dignity, and poetically enriched that form of tragedy which the French gratify their vanity by claiming as peculiarly their own, and which they do not hesitate to proclaim an improvement on the Greek! This class is essentially rhetorical. The French public seem to estimate the master-pieces of their favourite tragic poets, chiefly by the number of fine quotable passages they supply; while their critics estimate their worth by their conformity with certain purely artificial rules. One of them says, “Though the English stage has not one perfect tragedy [we had thought Cato to be perfect in their eyes], yet it has many fine scenes: we cannot say so much for the German.” In this the critic is wrong on his own principle. The great works of Schiller contain, relatively, as many splendid declamatory passages as are to be met with in the