excess of admiration; on the contrary, it will behoove him to lift up
his voice, how feeble soever, how unheeded soever, against the common
delusion; from which, if he can save, or help to save any mortal, his
endeavours will have been repaid.

With these things in some measure before us, we must remind our readers
of another influence at work in this affair, and one acting, as we
think, in the contrary direction. That pitiful enough desire for
'originality' which lurks and acts in all minds, will rather, we
imagine, lead the critic of Foreign Literature to adopt the negative
than the affirmative with regard to Goethe. If a writer indeed feel that
he is writing for England alone, invisibly and inaudibly to the rest of
the Earth, the temptations may be pretty equally balanced; if he write
for some small conclave, which he mistakenly thinks the representative
of England, they may sway this way or that, as it chances. But writing
in such isolated spirit is no longer possible. Traffic, with its swift
ships, is uniting all nations into one; Europe at large is becoming more
and more one public; and in this public, the voices for Goethe, compared
with those against him, are in the proportion, as we reckon them, both
as to the number and value, of perhaps a hundred to one. We take in, not
Germany alone, but France and Italy; not the Schlegels and Schellings,
but the Manzonis and De Staels. The bias of originality, therefore, may
lie to the side of censure; and whoever among us shall step forward,
with such knowledge as our common critics have of Goethe, to enlighten
the European public, by contradiction in this matter, displays a
heroism, which, in estimating his other merits, ought nowise to be
forgotten.

Our own view of the case coincides, we confess, in some degree with that
of the majority. We reckon that Goethe's fame has, to a considerable