Following chronological order in this fertile period, we come after Wieland to Herder, born at Mohrungen, a small town of Eastern Prussia, in 1744. Like Wieland, Goethe, and Schiller, Herder was drawn to Weimar by the munificient spirit of the Duchess Amalia, and her son, the grand Duke Augustus, illustrious and ever memorable, as enlightened fosterers of genius--shining examples to sovereigns, kingly or popular. Herder was appointed in his thirty-second year, court preacher at Weimar, and there passed the remainder of his life, in diversified usefulness, simultaneously inspecting schools and elaborating philosophical essays, learnedly elucidating the Old Testament, and at the same time reviving and awakening a taste for national songs. His greatest work, entitled _Ideas for the Philosophy of History_, is esteemed one of the noblest productions of modern times. Herder is called by Richter, a Christian Plato. And here, next to Herder, and a congenial and profounder spirit, we will speak of Richter himself, born in {378} 1763. Richter, better known by his Christian names, Jean Paul, is a fine sample of the German character. The truthfulness of the Germans, their deep religious feeling, their earnestness and their playfulness, (far removed from frivolity) their enthusiasm and their tendency to the mystical, their warm affections and aptness to sympathy, are all not only traceable in his works, but prominent in the broad vivid lines of his erratic pen. In the union of learning with genius, Richter surpasses Coleridge. His wonderful fictions are out of the reach of common readers, not more by their learned illustrations and their subtleties, than by their wild irregularity of form and arbitrary structure, whereby the world generally is deprived of the enjoyment of a fund of the most tender pathos, gorgeous description, bold, keen wit and satire, and the richest humor in modern literature. His two greatest works are on education, and on the philosophy of criticism. He was several years in writing each; and storehouses they are of deep and just thought, of searching analysis, and of great truths, evolved by the reason of one of the world's profoundest thinkers, and illuminated by flashes of genius of almost painful intensity. They are works, each of them, to be studied page by page. Nothing similar to or approaching them exists in English literature. Of the writers who in this remarkable epoch belong to the first class in the highest department of letters, the poetical or creative, we have spoken--in the cursory manner necessary in a general sketch--of all, save the two greatest, Schiller and Goethe.