Baron de la Motte Fouque, one of the foremost of the minstrels or
tale-tellers of the realm of spiritual chivalry--the realm whither
Arthur's knights departed when they "took the Sancgreal's holy
quest,"--whence Spenser's Red Cross knight and his fellows came forth
on their adventures, and in which the Knight of la Mancha believed,
and endeavoured to exist.

La Motte Fouque derived his name and his title from the French
Huguenot ancestry, who had fled on the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes. His Christian name was taken from his godfather, Frederick
the Great, of whom his father was a faithful friend, without
compromising his religious principles and practice. Friedrich was
born at Brandenburg on February 12, 1777, was educated by good
parents at home, served in the Prussian army through disaster and
success, took an enthusiastic part in the rising of his country
against Napoleon, inditing as many battle-songs as Korner. When
victory was achieved, he dedicated his sword in the church of
Neunhausen where his estate lay. He lived there, with his beloved
wife and his imagination, till his death in 1843.

And all the time life was to him a poet's dream. He lived in a
continual glamour of spiritual romance, bathing everything, from the
old deities of the Valhalla down to the champions of German
liberation, in an ideal glow of purity and nobleness, earnestly
Christian throughout, even in his dealings with Northern mythology,
for he saw Christ unconsciously shown in Baldur, and Satan in Loki.

Thus he lived, felt, and believed what he wrote, and though his
dramas and poems do not rise above fair mediocrity, and the great
number of his prose stories are injured by a certain monotony, the