translated into prose by Dr. Bernays; into verse by Archer Gurney (1842), and later (1871) by the late Mr. Bayard Taylor.
It is a natural enough transition from Faust to Reynard the Fox. Of this charming apologue of the Middle Ages, which Grimm would claim to be of German or Flemish origin, but which is clearly traceable to that fertile source of fictitious story, the fables of Bidpai, an English version was among the earliest productions of the press of Caxton,—re-edited by Mr. Thoms for the Percy Society in 1844. Retaining its hold upon the public through the intervening centuries, it has continued to appear in every variety of form, in prose and in verse, down to the version by Mr. Holloway in 1852. But it is in the Reineke Fuchs of Goethe that the still verdant allegory has been wrought to a pitch of consummate perfection, as an exhibition of the triumph of cunning and hypocrisy, and a trenchant satire upon the world and its ways. This, too, may be had of any size, and at any price; but the lover of luxurious editions will look out for an original copy of the pracht-Ausgabe, in quarto form, with the exquisite illustrations, either on steel or wood, according to price, from the designs of Wilhelm von Kaulbach. If, on the other hand, he is innocent of German, he may console himself with the spirited and Hudibrastic rendering of Goethe's version by Thomas James Arnold (1855, 8vo, pp. 320), with the clever illustrations of Joseph Wolf; or the later issue of the same (royal 8vo, 1861), with the seventy wood-cut designs of Von Kaulbach, from the larger work; or, finally, the version by E. W. Holloway, 1852, quarto, with the thirty-seven engravings on steel from the designs of H. Leutemann.
Such is the fullness and manysidedness of the genius of Goethe, and so full of energy and activity his long literary career, that the briefest notice of his various productions would demand a far greater space than I have here at my disposal. It is to him that the Germans are, in a great measure, indebted for the present condition of their noble language, and their appreciation of its qualities and capabilities. When the Sorrows of Werther, in 1774, announced the dawn of a genius which was destined for immortality, the dispute between the adherents of Gottsched and Bodmer was yet unsettled, and it was still an open question whether the nascent literature was to receive its early influence from the traditions and examples of the French or English writers. It was Goethe unquestionably, who, by his earlier works, helped, in the face of reproach and ridicule, to decide the wavering national taste. It was mainly by his example that the language was freed from formal restraint; that heterogeneous accretions were excluded; and its powers of expression developed by the formation of notional compounds, in accordance with the rules of verbal analogy. Hence it is that the German language, by an ever-changing co-ordination of its own primal elements, is, after the Greek, perhaps the richest and most flexible of the various modes of human speech; and that the Germans possess the advantage, enjoyed to a large extent by ourselves, of being able to study, in almost archetypal perfection, the masterpieces of other literatures. The French, on the other hand, have scarcely a good translation in their language, while their "creaking lyre," once the envy of the Germans, is ill adapted, at least for the higher forms of poetical expression. The German, indeed, it essentially the language of poetry; while, were I called upon to assign to the other idioms of Europe the department for which each was best
