ether Goethe or Schiller was the greater name; and Professor Felton of Harvard University took the pains to translate a long history of German literature by Menzel, the one object of which was to show that Goethe was quite a secondary figure, and not destined to any lasting reputation.
It was one of the objections to Margaret Fuller, in the cultivated Cambridge circle of that day, that she spoke disrespectfully of Menzel in the Dial, and called him a Philistine—the first introduction into English, so far as I know, of that word since familiarized by Arnold and others.
We fancy France to be a place where, if governments are changeable, literary fame, fortified by academies, rests on sure ground.
But Theophile Gautier, in the preface to his Les Grotesques, says just the contrary.
He declares that in Paris all praise or blame is overstated, because, in order to save the trouble of a serious opinion, they take up one writer temporarily in order to get rid of the rest.
There are, h