More important as literature were the double influences of return on the mediæval past and of inspiration by the new political and social ideas which gave the impulse to the genius of Goethe, Schiller, Bürger, and others. Goethe began as the child of Rousseau, but as a child who had read Kant, and drunk deep of the romance of the Middle Ages. Doubtless his is the greatest name of modern Germany, both as a student of life, of nature, of history, and of thought. He was the spiritual parent of Scott, with his _Götz von Berlichingen_, and, with Richter, of Carlyle. Through himself and his English or Scottish disciples, Goethe has been the most fertile source of change in the literature of the nineteenth century. In extreme old age, curious to say, he gave the first impulse to the study of early religion as displayed in the obscure rites and beliefs of the Australian natives: a theme remote enough from his effect on the poetry of Matthew Arnold. Probably the two parts of his _Faust_ and his _Roman Lyrics_ are the most popular, and, as literature, the most permanent parts of his work, with _Werther_, _Wilhelm Meister_, and _Elective Affinities_, in prose. Schiller, beginning with the boyish romanticism of _The Robbers_, became a kind of classic in his later dramas. Lessing and Winckelmann were the most sound and fertile influences in criticism. _The Laocoon_ remains indispensable. The patriotic lyrists resurrected the national spirit of the Teutonic race, and Heine, Hebrew by race and half French in character, combined the characteristics of Lucian, Burns, and Voltaire. Wolf, writing in Latin (and I believe that his work on Homer has never attained a third edition, and has never been translated into English), became the parent, for good or evil, of what is called the Higher Criticism, Lachmann introducing the painfully conjectural tendencies of that intellectual exercise. Its application to scriptural texts is notorious, but not precisely as part of literature. Like other European countries, the Germany of the close of the century is not remarkable for resplendent genius in poetry or fiction, though novels abound. The scientific, historical, and scholarly literature is of vast profusion. In thoroughness and tireless patience, Germany is the teacher of the world, while in curious contrast to her practical genius is the love of some of her scholars for baseless conjecture. The “insularity” with which the English are charged is a matter of reproach by French scholars against Germany. Some sets of ideas, long familiar in America, England, and the Latin nations, are only now beginning to reach German classical scholars.