in Germany by William Schlegel’s, and Uhland’s, and others’ studies in old Norse mythology and poetry; by Tieck’s translation of “Don Quixote” [18] and by Johann Dietrich Gries’ of Calderon.  The romanticists, indeed, and especially Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, were most accomplished translators.  Schlegel’s great version of Shakspere is justly esteemed one of the glories of the German tongue.  Heine affirms that it was undertaken solely for polemical purposes and at a time (1797) when the enthusiasm for the Middle Ages had not yet reached an extravagant height, “Later, when this did occur, Calderon was translated and ranked far above Shakespeare. . . .  For the works of Calderon bear most distinctly the impress of the poetry of the Middle Ages, particularly of the two principal epochs, knight-errantry and monasticism.  The pious comedies of the Castilian priest-poet, whose poetical flowers had been besprinkled with holy water and canonical perfumes . . . were now set up as models, and Germany swarmed with fantastically pious, insanely profound poems, over which it was the fashion to work one’s self into a mystic ecstasy of admiration, as in ‘The Devotion to the Cross’; or to fight in honour of the Madonna, as in ‘The Constant Prince.’ . . .  Our poetry, said the Schlegels, is superannuated. . . .  Our emotions are withered; our imagination is dried up. . . .  We must seek again the choked-up springs of the naive, simple poetry of the Middle Ages, where bubbles the elixir of youth.”  Heine adds that Tieck, following out this prescription, drank so deeply of the mediaeval folk tales and ballads that he actually became a child again and fell to lisping.

There is a suggestive analogy between the position of the Warton brothers in England and the Schlegel brothers in Germany.  The Schlegels, like the Wartons, were leaders in the romantic movement of their time and country, and were the inspirers of other men.  The two pairs were alike also in that their best service was done in the field of literary history, criticism, and exposition, while their creative work was imitative and of comparatively small value.  Friedrich Schlegel’s scandalous romance “Lucinde” is of much less importance than his very stimulating lectures on the “History of Literature” and the “Wisdom and Languages of India";[19] and his elder brother, though an accomplished metrist and translator, was not successful in original verse.  But this resemblance between the Wartons and the Schlegels must not be pressed too far.  Here, as at many other points, the German movement had greater momentum.  The Wartons were men of elegant scholarship after their old-fashioned kind, a kind which joined the usual classical culture of the English universities to a liberal—­and in their century somewhat paradoxical—­enthusiasm in antiquarian pursuits.  But the Schlegels were men of really wide learning and of depth in criticism.  Compared with their scientific method and grasp of principles, the “Observations”