There is a species of remote partiality in Goethe’s mode of delineating the sins and sorrows of his fellows, that seems hardly human and still less divine; “Das ist daemonisch,” to use his own expression about Shakespeare, who, however, had nothing whatever in common with that quality of moral neutrality of the great German genius.

Perhaps nothing indicates what I should call Goethe’s intellectual unhumanity so much as his absolute want of sympathy with the progress of the race.  He was but mortal man, however, though he had the head of Jove, and Pallas Athena might have sprung all armed from it.  Once, and once only, if I remember rightly, in his conversations with Eckermann, the cause of mankind elicits an expression of faith and hope from him, in some reference to the future of America.  I recollect, on reading the second part of “Faust” with my friend Abeken (assuredly the most competent of all expounders of that extraordinary composition), when I asked him what was the signification of that final cultivation of the barren sea sand, in Faust’s blind old age, and cried, “Is it possible that he wishes to indicate the hopelessness of all attempt at progress?” his replying, “I am afraid he was no believer in it.”  And so it comes that his letters to Madame von Stein leave one only amazed with the more sorrowful admiration that the unrivaled genius of the civilized world in its most civilized age found perfect satisfaction in the inane routine of the life of a court dignitary in a petty German principality.

It is worthy of note how, in the two instances of his great masterpieces, “Faust” and “Wilhelm Meister,” Goethe has worked up in a sequel all the superabundant material he had gathered for his subject; and in each case how the life-blood of the poet pulses through the first part, while the second is, as it were, a mere storehouse of splendid intellectual supply which he has wrought into elaborate phantasmagoria, dazzling in their brilliancy and wonderful in their variety, but all alike difficult to comprehend and sympathize with—­the rare mental fragments, precious like diamond dust, left after the cutting of those two perfect gems.

Free-trade had hardly uttered a whisper yet upon any subject of national importance when the monopoly of theatrical property was attacked by Mr. Arnold, of the English Opera House, who assailed the patents of the two great theaters, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and demanded that the right to act the legitimate drama (till then their especial privilege) should be extended to all British subjects desirous to open play-houses and perform plays.  A lawsuit ensued, and the proprietors of the great houses—­“his Majesty’s servants,” by his Majesty’s royal patent since the days of the merry monarch—­defended their monopoly to the best of their ability.  My father, questioned before a committee of the House of Commons upon the subject, showed forth the evils likely, in his opinion, to result to the dramatic