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fifteenth and eighteenth centuries brought side by side only put each
other out of countenance.

A similar superstition displayed itself in the cultivation of the arts,
particularly that of painting. The great works of the native masters,
in which Germany is so rich, were deservedly admired, but they were not
always studied in the same spirit in which the great Italian artists of
the fifteenth century profited by the works of their predecessors. The
new German school, though it has to boast many productions of genius,
too often betrays by manner, affectation and caricature, its dependent
and arbitrary origin. Those who least understand their models cling to
the surface with indiscriminate imitation, and copy and even exaggerate
defects. Their extravagances seem to justify the aversion of those who
are equally partial in an opposite direction, and widen the breach
between the classical and romantic schools. The conflict of opinions
thus produced, intimately connected as it is with the other phenomena
of the day, forms an important feature in the intellectual face of
Germany, and the description of it has been woven by the author, with
inimitable art and an irony that never relaxes its impartiality, into
the texture of the first Novel.

One of the consequences of the vicissitudes and revolutions which
Germany had undergone was the revival of religious feeling. In the last
century, partly from internal causes, partly from the influence of
foreign manners and opinions, it had every where begun to languish, and
had been almost entirely banished from the higher and educated classes.
But the disasters and reverses of so many eventful years had subdued
the irreligious levity, so little congenial to the German character;
the very excess of calamity which seemed to have extinguished hope, had
awakened a faith which gained strength even from despair. The war too
which rescued Europe from the last and most imminent danger of an
universal monarchy, was in Germany essentially a religious war. It was
neither the desire of revenge nor of glory, nor even of liberty itself
as the ultimate end, which nourished the enthusiasm there excited; the
feeling which animated all the leading spirits, and which operated
instinctively on the least reflecting, was the conviction that they
were engaged in the highest and holiest of causes; that the moral, as
well as the political regeneration of Europe depended on the issue of
that struggle. The d