hours. No poverty of invention or want of power on the part of
translators could entirely destroy the innate beauty of those popular
traditions; but here, in England at least, they had almost dwindled
out, or at any rate had been lost sight of as home-growths. We had
learnt to buy our own children back, disguised in foreign garb; and
as for their being anything more than the mere pastime of an idle
hour--as to their having any history or science of their own--such an
absurdity was never once thought of. It had, indeed, been remarked,
even in the eighteenth century--that dreary time of indifference and
doubt--that some of the popular traditions of the nations north of
the Alps contained striking resemblances and parallels to stories in
the classical mythology. But those were the days when Greek and Latin
lorded it over the other languages of the earth; and when any such
resemblance or analogy was observed, it was commonly supposed that
that base-born slave, the vulgar tongue, had dared to make a clumsy
copy of something peculiarly belonging to the twin tyrants who ruled
all the dialects of the world with a pedant's rod.

At last, just at the close of that great war which Western Europe
waged against the genius and fortune of the first Napoleon; just as
the eagle--Prometheus and the eagle in one shape--was fast fettered
by sheer force and strength to his rock in the Atlantic, there arose
a man in Central Germany, on the old Thuringian soil, to whom it was
given to assert the dignity of vernacular literature, to throw off
the yoke of classical tyranny, and to claim for all the dialects of
Teutonic speech a right of ancient inheritance and perfect freedom
before unsuspected and unknown. It is almost needless to mention this
honoured name. For the furtherance of the good work which he began
nearly fifty years ago, he still lives and still labours. There is no
spot on which an accent of Teutonic speech is uttered where the name