But who were Nicolai and Engel, and what did they against the famous enchanter?  The former was born in 1733, at Berlin, where he carried on his father’s business of book-selling, pursued literature with marked success, and attained to old age, full of literary honours.  By means of three critical journals (the Literatur-Briefe, the Bibliothek der Schoenen Wissenschaftern, and the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek,) which he conducted with the powerful cooperation of Lessing, and of his intimate friend Mendelssohn, and to which he contributed largely himself, he became very considerable in the German world of letters, and so continued for the space of twenty years.  Joerdens, in his Lexicon, speaks highly of the effect of Nicolai’s writings in promoting freedom of thought, enlightened views in theology and philosophy, and a sound taste in fine literature—­describes him as a brave battler with intolerance, hypocrisy, and confused conceptions in religion; with empty subtleties, obscurities, and terminologies, that can but issue in vain fantasies, in his controversial writings on the ’so-named critical philosophy.’  He engaged with the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, on its appearance in 1781, in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek; first explained his objections to it in the 11th vol. of his Reisebeschreibung, (Description of a Journey through Germany and Switzerland in the year 1781,) and afterwards, in his romance entitled The Life and Opinions of Sempronius Gundibert, a German Philosopher, sought to set forth the childish crotchets and abuses imputable to many disciples of this philosophy in their native absurdity.  The ratsbone alluded to by Klopstock, was doubtless contained in the above-named romance, which the old poet probably esteemed more than Nicolai’s more serious polemics.

Gundibert has had its day, but in a fiction destined to a day of longer duration,—­Goethe’s Faust,—­the Satirist is himself most effectively satirised.  There he is, in that strange yet beautiful temple, pinned to the wall in a ridiculous attitude, to be laughed at as long as the temple itself is visited and admired.  This doom came upon him, not so much for his campaign against the Kanteans, as for his Joys of Werter,—­because he had dared to ridicule a book, which certainly offered no small temptations to the parodist.  Indeed he seems to have been engaged in a series of hostilities with Fichte, Lavater, Wieland, Herder, and Goethe.

(See Mr. Hayward’s excellent translation of Faust, of which I have heard a literary German say that it gave a better notion of the original than any other which he had seen.)

In the Walpurgisnacht of the Faust he thus addresses the goblin dancers:—­

     Ihr seyd noch immer da!  Nein das ist unerhoert! 
     Verschwindet doch!  Wir haben ja aufgeklaert!

     ’Fly!  Vanish!  Unheard of impudence!  What, still there! 
     In this enlightened age too, when you have been
     Proved not to exist?’—­Shelley’s Translation.