Vogts and Schmidts must work for him like beasts of burden. He spends in Italy for doing nothing a salary of 1800 dollars, and they, for half that sum, must do double work." One reads such sentences from a Schiller with pain; and there are several other passages in the correspondence which betray a jealousy of his great rival, explicable perhaps by the uneasy, unhappy condition in which he then struggled, but which gives his admirers pain. This jealousy we shall hereafter see openly and even fiercely avowed. While Weimar grumbled, Weimar's duke in truer sympathy wrote affectionately to him, releasing him from all official duties, and extending the leave of absence as long as it might be desired. Without Goethe, Weimar must indeed have been quite another place to Karl August; but no selfishness made him desire to shorten his friend's stay in Italy. Accordingly, on the 22nd of February, Goethe quitted Rome for Naples, where he spent five weeks of hearty enjoyment. Throwing aside his incognito, he mixed freely with society, and still more freely with the people, whose happy careless far niente delighted him. He there made the acquaintance of Sir William Hamilton, and saw the lovely Lady Hamilton, the syren whose beauty led the noble Nelson astray. Goethe was captivated by her grace as she moved through the mazes of that shawl dance she made famous. He was also captivated in quite another manner by the writings of Vico, which had been introduced to him by his acquaintance Filangieri, who spoke of the great thinker with southern enthusiasm. "If in Rome one must study", he writes, "here in Naples one can only live." And he lived a manifold life on the seashore, among the fishermen, among the people, among the nobles, under Vesuvius, on the moonlit waters, on the buried causeway of Pompeii, in Pausilippo,-everywhere drinking in fresh delight, everywhere feeding his fancy and experience with new pictures. Thrice did he ascend Vesuvius; and as subsequently, during the campaign in France, we shall see him pursuing his scientific observations undisturbed by the cannon, so here also we observe him deterred by no perils from making the most of his opportunity. Nor is this the only noticeable LEWES, VOL. II. 4 trait. Vesuvius could make him forget in curiosity his personal safety, but it did not excite one sentence of poetry. His description is as quiet as if Vesuvius were Hampstead Heath. The enthusiasm breaks out, however, here and there. At Pæstum he was in raptures with the glorious antique temples, the remains of which still speak so eloquently of what Grecian Art must have been; and in their presence he felt himself finally quit of "the distorted saints and tobaccopipe columns of Gothic Art", which once had owned his allegiance, but from which he had gradually been withdrawing himself. In Italy, his conversion from Christianism to Hellenism was completed. Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Capua interested him less than might have been anticipated. "The Book of Nature", he says, "is after all the only one which has in every page important meanings." It was a book which fastened him as fairy tales fasten children. The sea, in ever-changing beauty, and the shores with their rich treasures were inexhaustible studies: "Here about the beach he wandered, nourishing a youth sublime Wandering thus lonely, his thoughts hurried by the music of the waves, the long baffling, long-soliciting mystery of vegetable forms grew into clearness before him, and the Typical Plant was no more a vanishing conception, but a principle clearly grasped. On the 2nd of April he reached Palermo. He stayed a fortnight among its orange trees and oleanders, given up to the exquisite sensations which, lotus-like, lulled him into forgetfulness of everything, save the present. Homer here first became a living poet to him. He bought a copy of the Odyssey, read it with unutterable delight, and translated as he went, for the benefit of his friend Kniep. Inspired by it, he sketched the plan of Nausikaa, a drama in which the Odyssey was to be concentrated. Like so many other plans, this was never completed. The garden of Alcinous had to yield to the Metamorphoses of Plants, which tyrannously usurped his thoughts. Palermo was the native city of Count Cagliostro, the auda cious adventurer who, three years before, had made so conspicuous a figure in the affair of the Diamond Necklace. Goethe's curiosity to see the parents of this reprobate, led him to visit them, under the guise of an Englishman bringing them news of their son. He has narrated the adventure at some length; but as nothing of biographical interest lies therein, I pass on with this brief indication, adding that his sympathy, always active, was excited in favour of the poor people, and he sent them twice pecuniary assistance, confessing the deceit he had practised. He returned to Naples on the 14th of May, not without a narrow escape from shipwreck. He had taken with him the two first acts of Tasso (then in prose), to remodel them in verse. He found on reading them over, that they were soft and vague in expression, but otherwise needing no material alteration. After a fortnight at Naples, he once more arrived in Rome. This was on the 6th of June, 1787, and he remained till the 22nd of April, 1788: ten months of labour, which only an activity so unusual as his own could have made so fruitful. Much of his time was wasted in the dabbling of an amateur, striving to make himself what Nature had refused to make him. Yet it is perhaps perilous to say that with such a mind any effort was fruitless. If he did not become a painter by his studies, the studies were doubtless useful to him in other ways. Art and antiquities he studied in company with artistic friends. Rome is itself an education, and he was eager to learn. Practice of the art sharpened his perceptions. He learned perspective, drew from the model, was passionate in endeavours to succeed with landscape, and even began to model a little in clay. Angelica Kaufmann told him, that in Art he saw better than anyone else; and the others believed perhaps that "with study" he would be able to do more than see. But all his study and all his practice were vain; he never attained even the excellence of an amateur. To think of a Goethe thus obstinately cultivating a branch of Art for which he had no talent, makes us look wi h kinder appreciation on the spectacle so frequently presented of really able men obstinately devoting themselves to produce poetry which no cultivated mind can read; men whose culture and insight, considerable though they be, are insufficient to make them perceive in themselves the difference between aspiration and inspiration. If some time was wasted upon efforts to become a painter, the rest was well employed. Not to mention his scientific investigations, there was abundance of work executed. Egmont was rewritten. The rough draft of the two first acts had been written at Frankfurt, in the year 1775; and a rough cast of the whole was made at Weimar, in 1782. He now took it up again, because the outbreak of troubles in the Netherlands once more brought the patriots into collision with the House of Orange. The task of rewriting was laborious, but very agreeable, and he looked with pride on the completed drama, hoping it would gratify his friends. These hopes were somewhat dashed by Herder, who-never much given to praise— would not accept Clärchen, a character which the poet thought, and truly thought, he had felicitously drawn. Besides Egmont, he prepared for the new edition of his works, new versions of Claudine von Villa Bella and Erwin und Elmire, two comic operas. Some scenes of Faust were written; also these poems: Amor als Landschaftsmaler; Amor als Gast; Künstlers Erdenwallen; and Künstlers Apotheose. He thus completed the redaction of the last four volumes of his Collected Works, which Göschen had undertaken to publish, and which we have seen him take to Carlsbad and to Italy, as his literary task. The effect of his residence in Italy, especially in Rome, was manifold and deep. Foreign travel, even to unintelligent, uninquiring minds, is always of great influence, not merely by the presentation of new objects, but also, and mainly, by severing the mind from all the intricate connections of habit and familiarity which mask the real relations of life. This severance is important, because it gives a new standing-point from which we can judge ourselves and others, and it shows how routiniary is much that we have been wont to regard as essential. Goethe certainly acquired clearer views with respect to himself and his career: severed from all those links of habit and routine which had bound him in Weimar, he learned in Italy to take another and a wider survey of his position. He returned home, to all appearance, a changed man. The crystallizing process which commenced in Weimar was completed in Rome. As a decisive example, we note that he there finally relinquishes his attempt to become a painter. He feels that he is born only for Poetry, and during the next ten years resolves to devote himself to Poetry alone. One result of his study of Art was to reconcile his theories and his tendencies. We have noted on several occasions the objective tendency of his mind, and we now find him recognizing that tendency as dominant in ancient Art. "Let me," he writes to Herder, "express my meaning in a few words. The ancients represented existences, we usually represent the effect; they pourtrayed the terrible, we terribly; they the agreeable, we agreeably, and so forth. Hence our exaggeration, mannerism, false graces, and all excesses. For when we strive after effect, we never think we can be effective enough." This admirable sentence is as inaccurate in an historical, as it is accurate in an æsthetical sense, unless by the ancients we understand only Homer and some pieces of sculpture. As a criticism of Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, Theocritus, Horace, Ovid, or Catullus, it is quite wide of the truth; indeed, it is merely the traditional fiction current about ancient art, which vanishes on a steady gaze; but inaccurate though it be, it serves to illustrate Goethe's theories. If he found that in Italy, it was because that best assimilated with his own tendencies, which were eminently concrete. "People talk of the study of the ancients," he says somewhere, "but what does it mean, except that we should look at the real world and strive to express it, for that is what they did." And to Eckermann he said: "all eras in a state of decline are subjective; on the other hand, all progressive eras have an objective tendency. Our present time is retrograde, for it is subjective." Here in Rome he listens to his critical friends with a quiet smile, "when in metaphysical discussions they held me not competent. I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which |