re-action, and lead, as in some recent instances, to a prosaic narrow-mindedness, that would seek to bring down the whole system of Indian civilization to the dull level of its own vulgar conceptions. Schlegel saw that the moment was critical. He saw that the edifice of oriental learning, raised at the cost of so much labour by Sir William Jones, was in danger of falling to pieces--that all the mighty results which Christian philosophy had anticipated from these inquiries, would be, if not frustrated, at least indefinitely postponed--that a wild, uncritical, extravagant fancifulness on the one hand, or a dull and dogged Rationalism on the other--(equally adverse as both are to the cause of historic truth)--would soon bring these researches into inextricable confusion; in short, that the time had arrived when they should be fairly brought before the more enlarged philosophy of Germany. Filled with this idea, and animated by that pure zeal for science, which is its own best reward, Schlegel resolves to betake him to the study of the Sanscrit tongue. But for the considerations I have ventured to suggest, such a resolution on the part of such a man would be surely calculated to excite regret. We should be inclined to lament that a mind so original, already saturated with so much elegant literature and solid learning, should be thus doomed in the bloom of its existence, to consume years in the toilsome acquisition of the most difficult of all languages. In prosecution of his undertaking, Schlegel repaired in the year 1802, to Paris, which had been long celebrated for her professors in the Eastern tongues, and where the national library presented to the oriental scholar, inexhaustible stores of wealth. Here, with the able assistance of those distinguished orientalists, M. M. de Langlès and Chézy, Schlegel made considerable progress in the study of Persian and Sanscrit literature. But while engaged in these laborious pursuits, he contrives to find time to plunge into the then almost unexplored mines of Provençal poesy--to undertake profound researches into the history of the middle age, and to deliver lectures on Metaphysics in the French language. If these lectures did not meet with all the success which might have been hoped for, this cannot surprise us, when we consider that the gross materialism which had long weighed on the Parisian mind, and from which it was then but slowly emerging, could ill accord with the lofty Platonism of the German; nor when we add to the disadvantage under which every one labours when speaking in a foreign tongue, the fact that nature had not favoured this extraordinary man with a happy delivery. From Paris, he wrote a series of articles on the early Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Provençal poetry. The article on Portuguese poetry is singularly beautiful, and contains, among other things, some remarks as new as they are just, on the influence of climate and locality in the formation of dialects.