180 Whit} or d utterly brutified and destroyed by successive importations of the "heavy, lumbering, monotonous stupidity of Kotzebue and Schiller." 63 Thomas James Mathias, pedantic little author of The Pursuits of Literature, declared in the fourth dialogue of that work (1797): No German nonsense sways my English heart, Unus'd at ghosts and rattling bones to start. 64 In the following year he expressed his opinion somewhat more extensively in a semi-political satire, The Shade o< Alexander Pope on the Bank; of the Thames. He especially disliked the plays translated from the German, not because they are foolish- ly sentimental but because they are of democratic tendency. These lines represent his position in the matter: No Congress props our Drama's falling state; The modern ultimatum is, 'Translate!' Thence spout the morals of the German school . . . No virtue shines but in the peasant's mien, No vice, but in patrician robes, is seen, Through four dull acts the Drama drags, and drawls, The fifth is stagetrick, and the curtain falls. 65 The most powerful satirical attack upon the sentimental German drama was the Anti- Jacobin's justly celebrated bur- lesque, The Rovers; or, The Double Arrangement. According to an explanatory letter of its imaginary author, Mr. Higgins, "its moral is obvious and easy; and it is one frequently incul- cated by the German dramas which I have had the good fortune to see; being no other than 'the reciprocal duties of one or more husbands to one or more wives, and to the children who may happen to arise out of this complicated and endearing connection.' ' The Rovers is not only cleverly effective in exposing the absurdi- ties of the plays which it imitates, but actually and spontaneous- ly funny. The song of Rogero about "the U-niversity of Gottingen" is so often quoted that it would be useless to print 63 The Baiiad and Maeiiad, 6th ed. (London, 1800), 65-66. 64 Pursuits oj Literature, 244. Mathias doubtless had in mind German ballads as well as German plays. 66 The Shade oj Alexander Pope, 57-64, one line on each page, the remaining
space being occupied by explanatory notes.
