The Abduction of Prometheus.  By Max Klinger

Berthold Auerbach.  By Hans Meyer

Two Coffins were carried away from the little House.  By Benjamin Vautier

Amrei briskly brought her Pitcher filled with Water.  By Benjamin Vautier

Tears fell upon the Paternal Coat.  By Benjamin Vautier

He gave her his Hand for the Last Time.  By Benjamin Vautier

While she was milking John asked her all kinds of Questions.  By Benjamin
Vautier

Jeremias Gotthelf

A New Citizen.  By Benjamin Vautier

The Bath.  By Benjamin Vautier

In Ambush.  By Benjamin Vautier

First Dancing Lessons.  By Benjamin Vautier

Fritz Reuter.  By Wulff

Bible Lesson.  By Benjamin Vautier

Between Dances.  By Benjamin Vautier

The Bridal Pair at the Civil Marriage Office.  By Benjamin Vautier

Adalbert Stifter.  By Daffinger

A Mountain Scene.  By H. Reifferscheid

Leavetaking of the Bridal Pair.  By Benjamin Vautier

The Barber Shop.  By Benjamin Vautier

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl

An Official Dinner in the Country.  By Benjamin Vautier

At the Sick Bed.  By Benjamin Vautier

A Village Funeral.  By Benjamin Vautier

* * * *

EDITOR’S NOTE

This volume, containing chiefly masterpieces of the Novel of Provincial Life, is illustrated by the principal works of one of the foremost painters of German peasant life, Benjamin Vautier.  These picture’s have been so arranged as to bring out in natural succession typical situations in the career of an individual from the cradle to the grave.  In order not to interrupt this succession, Auerbach’s Little Barefoot, likewise illustrated by Vautier, has been placed before Gotthelf’s Uli, The Farmhand, although Gotthelf, and not Auerbach, is to be considered as the real founder of the German village story.

The frontispiece, Karl Spitzweg’s Garret Window, introduces a master of German genre painting who in a later volume will be more fully represented.

KUNO Francke.

* * * *

THE NOVEL OF PROVINCIAL LIFE

By Edwin C. Roedder, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of German Philology, University of Wisconsin

To Rousseau belongs the credit of having given, in his passionate cry “Back to Nature!” the classic expression to the consciousness that all the refinements of civilization do not constitute life in its truest sense.  The sentiment itself is thousands of years old.  It had inspired the idyls of Theocritus in the midst of the magnificence and luxury of the courts of Alexandria and Syracuse.