Taylor of Norwich did more than any man of his generation, by his translations and critical papers in the Monthly Magazine and Monthly Review, to spread a knowledge of the new German literature in England.  When a lad of sixteen he had been sent to study at Detmold, Westphalia, and had spent more than a year (1781-82) in Germany, calling upon Goethe at Weimar, with a letter of introduction, on his way home to England.  “When his acquaintance with this literature began,” wrote Lucy Aikin, “there was probably no English translation of any German author but through the medium of the French, and he is very likely to have been the first Englishman of letters to read Goethe, Wieland, Lessing, and Buerger in the originals."[25] Some years before the publication of his “Lenora” he had printed for private distribution translations of Lessing’s “Nathan der Weise” (1791) and Goethe’s “Iphigenie auf Tauris” (1793).  In 1829-30 he gathered up his numerous contributions to periodicals and put them together in a three-volume “Historic Survey of German Poetry,” which was rather roughly, though not disrespectfully, handled by Carlyle in the Edinburgh Review.  Taylor’s tastes were one-sided, not to say eccentric; he had not kept up with the later movement of German thought; his critical opinions were out of date, and his book was sadly wanting in unity and a proper perspective.  Carlyle was especially scandalized by the slight space accorded to Goethe.[26] But Taylor’s really brilliant talent in translation, and his important service as an introducer and interpreter of German poetry to his own countrymen, deserve always to be gratefully remembered.  “You have made me hunger and thirst after German poetry,” wrote Southey to him, February 24, 1799.[27]

The year 1796, then, marks the confluence of the English and German romantic movements.  It seems a little strange that so healthy a genius as Walter Scott should have made his debut in an exhibition of the horrible.  Lockhart reports him, on the authority of Sir Alexander Wood, as reading his “William and Helen” over to that gentleman “in a very slow and solemn tone,” and then looking at the fire in silence and presently exclaiming.  “I wish to Heaven I could get a skull and two crossbones.”  Whereupon Sir Alexander accompanied him to the house of John Bell, surgeon, where the desired articles were obtained and mounted upon the poet’s bookcase.  During the next few years, Scott continued to make translations of German ballads, romances, and chivalry dramas.  These remained for the present in manuscript; and some of them, indeed, such as his versions of Babo’s “Otto von Wittelsbach” (1796-97) and Meier’s “Wolfred von Dromberg” (1797) were never permitted to see the light.  His second publication (February, 1799) was a free translation of Goethe’s tragedy, “Goetz von Berlichingen mit der Eisernen Hand.”  The original was a most influential work in Germany.  It had been already twenty-six years before the public