laboured onwards, page after page, I found myself from time to time turning back to the title of the book. Sure enough, it was

    Ueber Goethe's Faust

   . I laboured on—the suspicion deepening at every turn of the page that perhaps the binder might have bound up the wrong text under the title

    Ueber Goethe's Faust

   . At the fifty-third page I came to a dead stop. Except quite incidentally neither Goethe nor Faust had as yet been mentioned. These fifty-three pages had been entirely devoted to what seemed to my rather unmetaphysical mind a not very luminous or edifying dissertation on the difference between

    Ansicht

   and

    Einsicht

   —between mere Opinion and true critical Insight; and, as far as I could discover, the only conclusion as yet arrived at was that the writer possessed an exclusive monopoly in the last-mentioned article.

   But I will not inflict upon you any further description of my tusslings with Teutonic interpreters of

    Faust

   —with their

    egos

   and

    non-egos

   , their moral-æsthetic symbolisms and so on. Let us leave them to the tender mercies of Goethe himself, who was not sparing of his ridicule in regard to his commentators, nor, alas, at times in regard to his countrymen. 'Of all nations,' he says, 'the Germans understand me least.... Such people make life a burden by their abstruse thoughts and their

    Ideas

   , which they hunt up in all directions and insist on discovering in everything.... They come and ask

    me

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