[799]. They fill 4 out of the 6 vols., as given in ed. cit.

[800]. I have used the second edition (Breslau, 1820). The first appeared in 1818, as a mere booklet in comparison.

[801]. Vorlesungen über Æsthetik: Leipzig, 1829.

[802]. P. 7.

[803]. De Quincey’s Essay on Schlosser (Works, vol. vii.) is disfigured by his usual rather boisterous fooling and rigmarole, but very sound in the main.

CHAPTER IV.
THE CHANGE IN THE OTHER NATIONS.

The present chapter could hardly be omitted; but it must be almost necessarily rather an apology for what does not appear than a substantive presentation. Something has been said already[[804]] of the state of Italian and of Spanish criticism during the eighteenth century. Its lethargy was only quickened after (and even some time after) the beginning of the nineteenth, by the spread of those very waves of influence which have been described, and their origin and progress traced, partly in the last Book, and partly in the three preceding chapters of the present. Neither country contributed anything original to the critical change—to the establishment of Romanticism—though both had much to do with that establishment as furnishing those texts of past creation which were, as we have seen, almost the most powerful, and certainly the most beneficent, of all agencies in the revolution. None, perhaps, did so much by furnishing further scenery and apparatus to the new movement: though Byron, by adopting these, enhanced their influence in this way, yet it had been exercised long before he wrote—before he even existed—in England, from the time of the Castle of Otranto, in Germany, from one somewhat, but not so very much, later. But all this belongs to the far-off fringes of our subject, if even to them; and we have only too little room for its central and substantive portions.

The critical awakening of more backward and outlying nations and languages, such as Russian, Polish, and Hungarian, was in much the same case; that of the Scandinavian countries was a little more advanced. The closer relations in which Denmark at all times stood with Germany, and those which Sweden maintained, not merely with Germany but with France, must have kept them more to the front in these matters, while the double influence was of course still more constantly, though not quite so effectually, at work in Holland. Holberg and Tullin and Ewald, with Baggesen a little later in Denmark, rather accompanied than followed the reconstructive reformation of German literature; Kellgren, Leopold, and Thorn conducted the attack and defence in Sweden a little later still; and the literary decadence of Dutch was at last relieved, towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, by Southey’s friend, Bilderdijk. In regard to all the languages referred to in this paragraph, though not in regard to Italian and Spanish, I am in the disability formerly acknowledged, as to one of them—Dutch. But I cannot learn from any good authority that this disability is likely here to be fatal, or even injurious. In the history of the individual literatures their criticism is of course of great importance: but in the history of the general subject it can have very little.[[805]]

[804]. Vol. ii. Bk. VI. chap. iii. I do not yet know Molledano (R. y P. R.), Historia literaria de España, 9 (10) vols. 4to, 1769-79.