romances of Scott.[22] Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo were both powerfully impressed by Macpherson’s “Ossian.”  Gerard de Nerval made, at the age of eighteen, a translation of “Faust” (1828), which Goethe read with admiration, and wrote to the translator, saying that he had never before understood his own meaning so well.  “It was a difficult task at that time,” says Gautier, “to render into our tongue, which had become excessively timid, the bizarre and mysterious beauties of this ultra-romantic drama. . . .  From his familiarity with Goethe, Uhland, Buerger and L. Tieck, Gerard retained in his turn of mind a certain dreamy tinge which sometimes made his own works seem like translations of unknown poets beyond the Rhine. . . .  The sympathies and the studies of Gerard de Nerval drew him naturally towards Germany, which he often visited and where he made fruitful sojourns; the shadow of the old Teutonic oak hovered more than once above his brow with confidential murmurs; he walked under the lindens with their heart-shaped leaves; on the margin of fountains he saluted the elf whose white robe trails a hem bedewed by the green grass; he saw the ravens circling around the mountain of Kyffhausen; the kobolds came out before him from the rock clefts of the Hartz, and the witches of the Brocken danced their grand Walpurgisnight round about the young French poet, whom they took for a Jena student. . . .  He knows how to blow upon the postillion’s horn,[23] the enchanted melodies of Achim von Arnim and Clement Brentano; and if he stops at the threshold of an inn embowered in hop vines, the Schoppen becomes in his hands the cup of the King of Thule.”  Among the French romanticists of Hugo’s circle there was a great enthusiasm for wild German ballads like Buerger’s “Lenore” and Goethe’s “Erl-King.”  The translation of A. W. Schlegel’s “Vorlesungen ueber Dramatische Kunst und Litteratur,” by Madame Necker de Saussure, in 1814, was doubtless the first fruits of Madame de Stael’s “Allemagne,” published the year before.  Gautier himself and his friend Augustus Mac-Keat (Auguste Maguet) collaborated in a drama founded on Byron’s “Parisina.”  “Walter Scott was then in the full flower of his success.  People were being initiated into the mysteries of Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ . . . and discovering Shakspere under the translation, a little dressed up, of Letourneur; and the poems of Lord Byron, ‘The Corsair,’ ‘Lara,’ ‘The Giaour,’ ‘Manfred,’ ‘Beppo,’ ’Don Juan,’ were coming to us from the Orient, which had not yet grown commonplace.”  Gautier said that in le petit cenacle—­the inner circle of the initiated—­if you admired Racine more than Shakspere and Calderon, it was an opinion that you would do well to keep to yourself.  “Toleration is not the virtue of neophytes.”  As for himself, who had set out as a painter—­and only later deviated into letters—­he was all for the Middle Ages:  “An old iron baron, feudal, ready to take refuge from the encroachments