ncthon; Johnson was not more the friend of Edmund Burke than of
poor old Dr. Levitt. Goethe and Schiller met again; as they ultimately
came to live together, and to see each other oftener, they liked each
other better; they became associates, friends; and the harmony of
their intercourse, strengthened by many subsequent communities of
object, was never interrupted, till death put an end to it. Goethe, in
his time, has done many glorious things; but few on which he should
look back with greater pleasure than his treatment of Schiller.
Literary friendships are said to be precarious, and of rare
occurrence: the rivalry of interest disturbs their continuance; a
rivalry greater, where the subject of competition is one so vague,
impalpable and fluctuating, as the favour of the public; where the
feeling to be gratified is one so nearly allied to vanity, the most
irritable, arid and selfish feeling of the human heart. Had Goethe's
prime motive been the love of fame, he must have viewed with
repugnance, not the misdirection but the talents of the rising genius,
advancing with such rapid strides to dispute with him the palm of
intellectual primacy, nay as the million thought, already in
possession of it; and if a sense of his own dignity had withheld him
from offering obstructions, or uttering any whisper of discontent,
there is none but a truly patrician spirit that would cordially have
offered aid. To being secretly hostile and openly indifferent, the
next resource was to enact the patron; to solace vanity, by helping
the rival whom he could not hinder, and who could do without his help.
Goethe adopted neither of these plans. It reflects much credit on him
that he acted as he did. Eager to forward Schiller's views by exerting
all the influence within his power, he succeeded in effecting this;
and what was still more difficult, in suffering the character of
benefactor to merge in that of equal. They became not friends only,
but fellow-labourers: a connection productive of important
consequences in the history of both, particularly of the younger and
more undirected of the two.

Meanwhile the _History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands_ was in
part before the world; the first volume came out in 1788. Schiller's
former writings had given proofs of powers so great and various, such
an extent of general intellectual strength, and so deep an
acquaintance, both practical and scientific, with the art of
composition, that in a s