to be and do something more than nature had given them capacity for; and
accordingly they have been the means of bringing about not a little harm
both in art and literature. From their false principles in the fine
arts--principles which, however much trumpeted and gospeled about, were
in fact egotism united with weakness--our German artists have not yet
recovered, and are filling the exhibitions, as we see, with pictures
which nobody will buy. Frederick, the younger of these Dioscouri, choked
himself at last with the eternal chewing of moral and religious
absurdities, which, in his uncomfortable passage through life, he had
collected together from all quarters, and was eager to hawk about with
the solemn air of a preacher to every body: he accordingly betook
himself, as a last refuge, to Catholicism, and drew after him, as a
companion to his own views, a man of very fair but falsely overwrought
talent--Adam Müller.

"As for their Sanscrit studies again, that was at bottom only a _pis
aller_. They were clear-sighted enough to perceive that neither Greek nor
Latin offered any thing brilliant enough for them; they accordingly threw
themselves into the far East; and in this direction, unquestionably, the
talent of Augustus William manifests itself in the most honourable way.
All that, and more, time will show. Schiller never loved them: hated them
rather; and I think it peeps out of our correspondence how I did my best,
in our Weimar circles at least, to keep this dislike from coming to an
open difference. In the great revolution which they actually effected, I
had the luck to get off with a whole skin, (_sie liessen mich noth dürftig
stehen_,) to the great annoyance of their romantic brother Novalis, who
wished to have me _simpliciter_ deleted. 'Twas a lucky thing for me, in
the midst of this critical hubbub, that I was always too busy with myself
to take much note of what others were saying about me.