e during the eighteenth
century, as Voltaire was powerful for evil in France. Wielland, a
friend of Klopstock, and a romantic poet, might have been the German
Ariosto had he not abandoned poetry for prose. He tried to copy the
Greek, in which he failed to excel. During this conflict in Germany
between the French and English school, German literature was much
influenced by Macpherson's Ossian, and Scotch names are found in a
great many German works of this period. The literature of Germany
attained its highest beauty and finish in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries; and its people may well be proud of the splendid names that
adorn that period. The Gottingen School, which embraced Goethe and
Schiller, includes love, philosophy and the classics for its theme,
with a touch of the bucolic, modelled after Virgil, as in the "Louise"
of Voss. But it remained for the Romantic School, founded by Novalis,
the two Schlegels and Tieck, to oppose the study of the classic antique
on the ground that it killed all native originality and power. They
turned to the Middle Ages, and drew from its rich stores all that was
noblest and best. The lays of the Minnesingers were revived--the true
German spirit was cultivated, and the romantic German imagination
responded readily, so that during the dark period of the French
invasion, the national feeling was preserved pure and untouched by
means of these stirring and patriotic songs of the past.

About the same time as the advent of the Romanticists in Germany
appeared Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" in England, which is supposed to
belong to the same school of literature and to have been influenced by
the German. Scott was also numbered in this class; and it is from these
old German legends of the Minnesingers that Richard Wagner has drawn
the material for Lohengrin, Parsifal, and others of his magnificent
operas. In one department German scholars have attained a high
standard, and that is as historians of ancient classical literature.

Their researches into the language, religion, philosophy, social
economy, arts and sciences of ancient nations, has brought to light
much for which the student of literature will always be their debtor.

LATIN LITERATURE AND THE REFORMATION.

It has been said that the literati of the Middle Ages--the monks and
schoolmen--sought to keep the people in ignorance by writing in Latin.
Those who so think can ill have studied the trend of events in Europe
for