this day always keep him in view as a model. These English novelists since Richardson's reign are prosaic natures; to the prudish spirit of their time even pithy descriptions of the life of the common people are repugnant, and we see on yonder side of the channel those _bourgeois_ novels arise, wherein the petty, humdrum life of the middle classes is depicted. The public were surfeited with this deplorable class of literature until recently, when appeared the great Scot, who effected a revolution, or rather a restoration, in novel-writing. As Cervantes introduced the democratic element into romance, at a time when one-sided knight-errantry ruled supreme, so Walter Scott restored the aristocratic element to romance when it had wholly disappeared, and only a prosaic bourgeoisie was to be found there. By an opposite course Walter Scott again restored to romance that beautiful symmetry which we admire in Cervantes's _Don Quixote_. I believe that the merits of England's second great poet have never in this respect been recognised. His Tory proclivities, his partiality for the past, were wholesome for literature, and for those masterpieces of his genius that everywhere found favour and imitators, and which drove into the darkest corners of the circulating libraries those ashen-grey, ghostly remains of the _bourgeoisie_ romances. It is an error not to recognise Walter Scott as the founder of the so-called Historical Romance, and to endeavour to trace the latter to German initiative. This error arises from the failure to perceive that the characteristic feature of the Historical Romance consists just in the harmony between the aristocratic and democratic elements, and that Walter Scott, through the re-introduction of the aristocratic element, most beautifully restored that harmony which had been overthrown during the absolutism of the democratic element, whereas our German romanticists eliminated the democratic element entirely from their novels, and returned again to the ruts of those crazy romances of knight-errantry that flourished before Cervantes. Our De la Motte-Fouqué is only a straggler from the ranks of those poets who gave to the world _Amadis de Gaul_, and similar extravagant absurdities. I admire not only the talent, but also the courage of the noble Baron who, two centuries after the appearance of _Don Quixote_, has written his romances of chivalry. It was a peculiar period in Germany when the latter appeared and found favour with the public. What was the significance in literature of that partiality for knight-errantry, and for those pictures of the old feudal times? I believe that the German people desired to bid an eternal farewell to the middle ages, but moved with emotion as we Germans are so apt to be, we took our leave with a kiss. For the last time we pressed our lips to the old tombstone. True, some of us behaved in a very silly manner on that occasion. Ludwig Tieck, the smallest boy in school, dug the dead