The distinction, so often discussed in our own day, between _classic_ and _romantic_ poetry seems to me ultimately to depend upon the fact that the former knows no other motives than those which are purely human, actual, and natural; the latter, on the other hand, also treats artificial conventional, and imaginary motives as efficient. To such belong the motives which spring from the Christian mythus, also from the chivalrous over‐strained fantastical law of honour, further from the absurd and ludicrous Germano‐Christian veneration of women, and lastly from doting and mooning hyperphysical amorousness. But even in the best poets of the romantic class, _e.g._, in Calderon, we can see to what ridiculous distortions of human relations and human nature these motives lead. Not to speak of the Autos, I merely refer to such pieces as “_No siempre el peor es cierto_” (The worst is not always certain), and “_El postrero duelo en España_” (The last duel in Spain), and similar comedies _en capa y espada_: with the elements mentioned there is here further associated the scholastic subtility so often appearing in the conversation which at that time belonged to the mental culture of the higher classes. How decidedly advantageous, on the contrary, is the position of the poetry of the ancients, which always remains true to nature; and the result is that classical poetry has an unconditional, romantic poetry only a conditional, truth and correctness; analogous to Greek and Gothic architecture. Yet, on the other hand, we must remark here that all dramatic or narrative poems which transfer their scene to ancient Greece or Rome lose by this from the fact that our knowledge of antiquity, especially in what concerns the details of life, is insufficient, fragmentary, and not drawn from perception. This obliges the poet to avoid much and to content himself with generalities, whereby he becomes abstract, and his work loses that concreteness and individualisation which is throughout essential to poetry. It is this which gives all such works the peculiar appearance of emptiness and tediousness. Only Shakspeare’s works of this kind are free from it; because without hesitation he has presented, under the names of Greeks and Romans, Englishmen of his own time.