[655]. In vols. i. and ii.
[656]. ii. 383.
[657]. i. 283 sq. He is very interesting here to compare and contrast with Goethe.
[658]. i.-xx. of the 60-vol. ed. (Stuttgart, 1827). I have in some cases sought to compare, but have not been able continuously to work with, the much better ed. of Suphan (32 vols.: Berlin, 1877-1887).
[659]. The phrase is De Quincey’s and a good one: but it does not occur in his Essay on Herder, which is one of the most unsatisfactory things he ever did.
[660]. Einleitung to the Fragmente (1767), ed. cit., i. 9.
[661]. I am not yet sure whether Vico exercised much influence on Herder in this direction: but Herder certainly ranks next to Vico as a leader in it, and had as much more immediate and wide-spreading influence as he had less originality and force. Professor Flint, I may say, thinks the actual connection of the two slight.
[662]. Ed. cit., vols. i. and ii.
[663]. The Germans had been creditably troubled about their prosodic souls ever since Opitz (see the large concernment of this matter in Borinski, op. cit. sup.); and the middle of the eighteenth century saw the strict iambic Alexandrines of Opitz himself and others deserted, partly for the so-called “British”[“British”] or Miltonic scansion (decasyllables with certain licences of substitution), partly for classical metres and unrhymed “Pindarics,” both of which had a great reflex influence on ourselves.
[664]. 1769. Ed. cit., vols. xiii., xiv.