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Frederick Schlegel is, that his romance arches over every thing like a
sky, and excludes nothing; he delights indeed to override every thing
despotically, with one dominant theological and ecclesiastical idea, and
now and then, of course, gives rather a rough jog to whatever thing may
stand in his way; but generally he seeks about with cautious,
conscientious care to find room for every thing; and for a wholesale
dealer in denunciation (as in some views we cannot choose but call him) is
really the most kind, considerate, and charitable Aristarchus that ever
wielded a pen. Hear what Varnhagen Von Ense says on this point--"The
inward character of this man, the fundamental impulses of his nature, the
merit or the results of his intellectual activity, have as yet found none
to describe them in such a manner as he has often succeeded in describing
others. It is not every body's business to attempt an anatomy and
re-combination of this kind. One must have courage, coolness, profound
study, wide sympathies, and a free comprehensiveness, to keep a steady
footing and a clear eye in the midst of this gigantic, rolling
conglomeration of contradictions, eccentricities, and singularities of
all kinds. Here every sort of demon and devil, genius and ghost, Lucinde
and Charlemagne, Alarcos, Maria, Plato, Spinoza and Bonald, Goethe
consecrated and Goethe condemned, revolution and hierarchy, reel about
restlessly, come together, and, what is the strangest thing of all, do
_not_ clash. For Schlegel, however many Protean shapes he might assume,
never cast away any thing that had ever formed a substantial element in
his intellectual existence, but found an _advocatus Dei_ to plead always
with a certain reputable eloquence even for the most unmannerly of them;
and with good reason too, for in his all-appropriating and curiously
combining soul, there did exist a living connexion between the most
apparently contradictory of his ideas. To point out this connexion, to
trace the secret thread of unity through the most distant extremes, to
mark the delicate shade of transition from one phasis of intellectual
development to another, to remove, at every doubtful point, the veil and
to expose the substance, that were a problem for the sagacity of no
common critic."[I] We take the hint. It is not every Byron that finds a
Goethe to take him to pieces and build him up again, and peruse him and
admire him, as Cuvier did the Mammoth. Those who feel an inw