society, and who had passed through the great ordeals of life, but only on "the boards representing the universe." _Theodor Hildebrandt_ became the Shakespeare of Düsseldorf. The translation of the works of the English poet by Schlegel had been published some time earlier, and Immermann, in Düsseldorf, had been the first to offer Shakespeare a home on the German stage. The performances of his tragedies were regarded as red-letter days. During the three years of Immermann's leadership (1834-37), _Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _King John_, _King Lear_, _The Merchant of Venice_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Othello_, and _Julius Cæsar_ were performed on fifteen occasions in all.[1] To give the titles of these plays is at once to characterise the subject-matter of Hildebrandt's paintings. He very often had a hand in the staging of the plays, and is said to have shown a remarkable histrionic talent in the performances at Schadow's. He rarely went to other poets for his inspiration, as in his "Pictures from Faust" and his "Beware of the Water Nymph," where he honoured Goethe, and in his "Brigands," where he may have been inspired by one of the many variations on _Rinaldo Rinaldini_ that flooded the market at the time, or perhaps also by Byron, whose influence was very marked on the Düsseldorf school. Goethe's _Frauengestalten_, more especially the Leonoras, were reproduced in oils by old father _Sohn_. _Eduard Steinbruck_ painted Genevièves, Red Riding Hoods, Elves, and Undines, after Tieck and Fouqué; _H. Stilke's_ "Pictures from the Crusades" introduced Walter Scott to the German public. Uhland's first ballads had brought into fashion the damsels who from the ramparts of their castles wave a sad farewell to the lonely shepherds; the ancestral tombs, in which the last knight of his race takes his everlasting rest; the lists, where melancholy heroes stab themselves. His _Love-song of the Shepherd to the Shepherdess_-- "Und halt ich dich in den Armen Auf freien Bergeshöhn, Wir sehn in die weiten Lande Und werden doch nicht gesehn," gave Bendemann the motive for his picture of the same name. Young Lessing had to thank Uhland for the subject of his first success, "The Sorrowing Royal Pair," which at one bound made his name one of the most honoured in German art. "Wohl sah ich die Eltern beide Ohne der Kronen Licht Im schwarzen Trauerkleide, Die Jungfrau sah ich nicht." After Bürger he painted a Leonora--of course in so-called mediæval costume, in order "to avoid the unpicturesque attire in fashion during the Seven Years' War"; and at the same time as Hildebrandt, "A Mourning Brigand," who, in the full light of the evening sun, sits brooding on a rock over the depravity of the world. That all of them were frantically enthusiastic for the Hohenstaufens is due to the publication of Von Rainer's History in 1823, which took a greater hold of the public than did Schiller's _History of the Thirty Years' War_, and inspired numerous dramas.