necessary circumstances of an event, which
did not happen so very long ago,--circumstances which can scarcely
escape the recollection of the reader. Kleist forgets that Wittenberg,
not Dresden, was the residence of the Elector of Saxony. Moreover, he
describes Dresden just according to its present aspect. The old town,
(Altstadt) scarcely existed at the time, and what shall we say of the
elector himself, who appears as a romantic, amorous, eccentric,
fantastical personage, when certainly it must have been either
Frederick the Wise, or the Steadfast, who belonged to the period of the
narrative? By over haste--for it certainly was not from design--this
excellent story loses its proper costume and accompanying
circumstances, whereas it would have been far more effective had the
author allowed himself time to place himself in the period with greater
truth. Another consequence of this deficiency in true locality is,
that the author, after long alluring us by his truth and nature, leads
us through a fanciful visionary world, which will not accord with the
previous one, which he has taught us to know so accurately. That
wondrous gipsy, who afterwards turns out to be the deceased wife of
Kohlhaas, that mysterious inscription, those ghost-like forms, that
sick, half-mad, and, afterwards, disguised elector; those weak, for the
most part, characterless forms, which, nevertheless, come forward with
a pretension, as if they would be considered superior to the real world
previously described, as if they would sell as dearly as possible that
mysterious nature, which comes to us little as possible,--that horrible
foreboding which the author suddenly feels in the presence of the
creatures of his own fancy--all this, we say, reminds us so forcibly of
many a weak product of our times, and of the ordinary demands of the
reading public, that we are forced, mournfully, to admit that even
distinguished authors, like Kleist--who in other respects does not
participate in these diseases of his day--must pay their tribute to the
time that has produced them."

No literature can produce a more original writer, than Ernst Theodore
Amadeus Hoffmann, from whom the translators have not scrupled to take
three stories. Some have called Hoffmann an imitator of Jean Paul, but
the assertion seems to be made rather because both writers are of an
eccentric and irregular character, than because their eccentricities
and irregularities are similar. Howe