party-leader. Yet he thinks him destitute of the wisdom of a law-giver, or what he emphatically calls, the _organic genius of state_--the power to found, or renovate a constitution. To Alexander, on the contrary, he attributes the plastic genius of legislation--the will and the ability to diffuse among nations the blessings of civilization--to plant cities, and establish free, flourishing and permanent communities. In the year 1797, Schlegel published his first important work, entitled "the Greeks and the Romans." This work was two or three years afterwards followed by another, entitled "History of Greek Poetry." These two writings in their original form are no longer to be met with--for in the new edition of the author's works, they not only have undergone various alterations and additions, but have been, as it were, melted into one work. Winkelmann's history of art was the model which Schlegel proposed to himself in this history of Greek poetry; and we must allow that the noble school which that illustrious man, as well as Lessing, Herder, and Goethe, had founded in Germany, never received a richer acquisition than in the work here spoken of. Prior to the illustrious writers I have named, Germany had produced a multitude of scholars distinguished for profound learning and critical acuteness; but their labours may be considered as only ancillary and preliminary to the works of men who, with an erudition and a perspicacity never surpassed, united a poetical sense and a philosophic discernment that could catch the spirit of antiquity, reanimate her forms, and place them in all their living freshness before our eyes. In the first chapter of the "History of Greek Poetry," Schlegel speaks of the religious rites and mysteries of the primitive Greeks, and of the Orphic poetry to which they gave rise. Contrary to the opinion of many scholars who, though they admit the present form of the Orphic hymns to be the work of a later period, yet refer their substance to a very remote antiquity, Schlegel assigns their origin to the age of Hesiod. "Enthusiasm," he says, "is the characteristic of the Orphic poetry--repose that of the Homeric poems." His observations however on the early religion of the Greeks, form, in my humble opinion, the least satisfactory portion of this work. He next gives an interesting account of the state of society in Greece in the age of Homer, as well as in the one preceding, and shews by a long process of inductive evidence, how the Homeric poetry was the crown and perfection of a long series of Bardic poems.