other poets loved to give their ballads a chivalrous character.  Fritz Stolberg wrote the beautiful song of a German boy, beginning, ’Mein Arm wird stark und gross mein Muth, gib, Vater, mir ein Schwert’; and the song of the old Swabian knight—­’Sohn, da hast du meinen Speer; meinem Arm wird er zu schwer.’  Lessing’s ‘Nathan,’ too, appealed to this enthusiasm for the times of chivalry, and must have strengthened the feeling.  An historian like the Swiss, Johannes Mueller, began to show the Middle Ages in a fairer light, and even to ascribe great merits to the Papacy.  But in doing so, Johannes Mueller was only following in Herder’s steps.  Herder . . . had written against the self-conceit of his age, its pride in its enlightenment and achievements.  He found in the Middle Ages the realization of his aesthetic ideas, namely, strong emotion, stirring life and action, everything guided by feeling and instinct, not by morbid thought:  religious ardor and chivalrous honor, boldness in love and strong patriotic feeling."[2]

When the founders of a truly national literature in Germany cut loose from French moorings, they had an English pilot aboard; and in the translations from German romances, dramas, and ballads that were made by Scott, Coleridge, Taylor, Lewis, and others, English literature was merely taking back with usury what it had lent its younger sister.  Mention has already been made of Buerger’s and Herder’s renderings from Percy’s “Reliques,"[3] an edition of which was published at Goettingen in 1767; as well as of the strong excitement aroused in Germany by MacPherson’s “Ossian."[4] This last found—­besides the Viennese Denis—­another translator in Fritz Stolberg, who carried his medievalism so far as to join the Roman Catholic Church in 1800.  Klopstock’s “Kriegslied,” written as early as 1749, was in the meter of “Chevy Chase,” which Klopstock knew through Addison’s Spectator papers.  Through Mallet, the Eddaic literature made an impression in Germany as in England; and Gerstenberg’s “Gedicht eines Skalden” (1766), one of the first-fruits of the German translation of the “Historire de Dannemarc,” preceded by two years the publication—­though not the composition—­of Gray’s poems from the Norse.

But the spirit which wrought most mightily upon the new German literature was Shakspere’s.  During the period of French culture there had been practically no knowledge of Shakspere in Germany.  In 1741 Christian von Borck, Prussian ambassador to London, had translated “Julius Caesar.”  This was followed, a few years later, by a version of “Romeo and Juliet.”  In 1762-66 Wieland translated, in whole or in part, twenty-two Shakspere’s plays.  His translation was in prose and has been long superseded by the Tieck-Schlegel translation (1797-1801-1810).  Goethe first made acquaintance with Shakspere, when a student at Leipsic, through the detached passages given in “Dodd’s Beauties of Shakspere."[5] He afterward got hold of Wieland’s translation, and when he went to Strassburg he fell under the influence of Herder, who inspired him with his own enthusiasm for “Ossian,” and the Volkslieder, and led him to study Shakspere in the original.