life; it expresses our religion; it recalls our history.”  Hence she notes the fact that while the Spaniards of all classes know by heart the verses of Calderon; while Shakspere is a popular and national poet among the English; and the ballads of Goethe and Buerger are set to music and sung all over Germany, the French classical poets are quite unknown to the common people, “because the arts in France are not, as elsewhere, natives of the very country in which their beauties are displayed.”  In her review of German poetry she gives a brief description, among other things, of the “Nibelungen Lied,” and a long analysis of Buerger’s “Leonora” and “Wilde Jaeger.”  She says that there are four English translations of “Leonora,” of which William Spenser’s is the best.  “The analogy between the English and German allows a complete transfusion of the originality of style and versification of Buerger. . . .  It would be difficult to obtain the same result in French, where nothing strange or odd seems natural.”  She points out that terror is “an inexhaustible source of poetical effect in Germany. . . .  Stories of apparitions and sorcerers are equally well received by the populace and by men of more enlightened minds.”  She notes the fondness of the new school for Gothic architecture, and describes the principles of Schlegelian criticism.  She transcribes A. W. Schlegel’s praises of the ages of faith and the generous brotherhood of chivalry, and his lament that “the noble energy of ancient times is lost,” and that “our times alas! no longer know either faith or love.”  The German critics affirm that the best traits of the French character were effaced during the reign of Louis XIV.; that “literature, in ages which are called classical, loses in originality what it gains in correctness”; that the French tragedies are full of pompous affectation; and that from the middle of the seventeenth century, a constrained and affected manner had prevailed throughout Europe, symbolised by the wig worn by Louis XIV. in pictures and bas-reliefs, where he is portrayed sometimes as Jupiter and sometimes as Hercules clad only in his lion’s skin—­but always with the perruque.  Heine complains that Mme. de Stael fell into the hands of the Schlegels, when in Germany, and that her account of German literature was coloured by their prejudices; that William Schlegel, in particular, became her escort at all the capitals of Europe and won great eclat thereby

Schlegel’s elegiac lament over the decay of chivalry may remind the English reader of the famous passage in Burke[10] about Marie Antoinette.  “Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers.  I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.  But the age of chivalry is gone.  That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the