apart from his true peers, the real sovereigns of Weimar—Herder, Wieland, and the others? The excuse must be found in circumstances of his time and temperament, which made the character of man of the world and man of affairs more attractive to him than the children of nature can conceive it to be in the eyes of one who is capable of being a consecrated bard.

The man of genius feels that literature has become too much a craft by itself. No man should live by or for his pen. Writing is worthless except as the record of life; and no great man ever was satisfied thus to express all his being. His book should be only an indication of himself. The obelisk should point to a scene of conquest. In the present state of division of labor, the literary man finds himself condemned to be nothing else. Does he write a good book? it is not received as evidence of his ability to live and act, but rather the reverse. Men do not offer him the care of embassies, as an earlier age did to Petrarca; they would be surprised if he left his study to go forth to battle like Cervantes. We have the swordsman, and statesman, and penman, but it is not considered that the same mind which can rule the destiny of a poem, may as well that of an army or an empire.[2] Yet surely it should be so. The scientific man may need seclusion from the common affairs of life, for he has his materials before him; but the man of letters must seek them in life, and he who cannot act will but imperfectly appreciate action.

The literary man is impatient at being set apart. He feels that monks and troubadours, though in a similar position, were brought into more healthy connection with man and nature, than he who is supposed to look at them merely to write them down. So he rebels; and Sir Walter Scott is prouder of being a good sheriff and farmer, than of his reputation as the Great Unknown. Byron piques himself on his skill in shooting and swimming. Sir H. Davy and Schlegel would be admired as dandies, and Gœthe, who had received an order from a publisher "for a dozen more dramas in the same style as Gœtz von Berlichingen," and though (in sadder sooth) he had already Faust in his head asking to be written out, thought it no degradation to become premier in the little Duchy of Weimar.

"Straws show which way the wind blows," and a comment may be drawn from the popular novels, where the literary man is obliged to wash off the ink in a violet bath, attest his courage in the duel, and hide his idealism beneath the vulgar nonchalance and coxcombry of the man of fashion.

If this tendency of his time had some influence in 

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