In the foregoing remarks little has been said about the literature of the century except among English-speaking peoples. Not being a Mezzofanti, I am not personally acquainted with the literature of all languages, and it is a vain thing to speak of books at second hand. It was not the nineteenth but the eighteenth century that saw Germany re-enter the field of pure literature, as distinguished from that of scholarship and science. Since the end of the Middle Ages, with their poets, German writers had mainly been devoted to theology and classical criticism. Latin was the language of the learned. Many ascertainable causes, in the middle and end of the eighteenth century, and doubtless many causes which cannot be ascertained, awoke again the Teutonic genius. The victories of Frederick the Great gave Germans patriotism and confidence in their own tongue. The philosophic and social works which preluded to the French Revolution stirred the German mind and required popular expression. Thus Kant wrote in his own native speech in reaction against the sceptical philosophy of David Hume, and Kant became the father of the long array of German metaphysicians from Hegel and Fichte to Schopenhauer and Hartmann. Their philosophy “cannot be briefly stated, especially in French,” as one of them said, but its general effect has been rather to counteract materialism by making it pretty plain that human nature is not so simple and easily to be explained as the Scottish philosophers were apt to suppose. In England, Coleridge gave an Anglican heart to the new German philosophy, which also influenced Hamilton, and still affects the philosophical teaching of Oxford. “It is nonsense, but is it _the right sort_ of nonsense?” asked the late Professor Sidgwick (a Cambridge man) when struggling with the examination papers of a Hegelian undergraduate.