as a dramatist.

In his two powerful novels, _Spiritual Knighthood_ (1850-51) and _The
Magician of Rome_ (1858-61), he states and discusses with great boldness
and skill those problems of the relation between Church and
State--between religion and citizenship--that confronted the thoughtful
men of the day.

The backbone of each of his numerous serious plays is some conflict,
reflecting directly or indirectly the prejudices, antagonisms,
shortcomings, and struggles of modern German social, religious, and
civic life. _King Saul_ (1839) embodies, for instance, the conflict
between ecclesiastical and temporal authority--between the authority of
the church and the claims of the thinker and the poet; _Richard Savage_
(1839) that between the pride of noble birth and the promptings of the
mother's heart; _Werner_ (1840), _A White Leaf_ (1842), and _Ottfried_
(1848), variations of the conflict between a man's duty and his
vacillating, simultaneous love of two women; _Patkul_ (1840), the
conflict between the hero's championship of truth and justice and the
triumphant inertia of authority in the hands of a weak prince; _Uriel
Acosta_ (1846), the best of the author's serious plays, embodies the
tragic conflict between the hero's conviction of truth and his love for
his mother and for his intended wife.

Gutzkow wrote three comedies which in point of continued popularity have
outlived all his other numerous contributions to the German stage:
_Sword and Queue_ (1843), _The Prototype of Tartuffe_ (1844), and _The
Royal Lieutenant_ (1849). The second of the three has the best motivated
plot; the first and third have, by virtue of their national substance,
their witty dialogue, and their droll humor, proved dearer to the heart
of the German people. In _The Prototype of Tartuffe_ we are shown
President La Roquette at the court of Louis XIV., obliged at last, in
spite of his long continued successful efforts to suppress the play, to
witness his own public unmasking in the person of Moliere's _Tartuffe_,
of whom he is the sneaking, hypocritical original. We hear him in anger
declare his readiness to join the Jesuits and we join in the laugh at
his discomfiture. The scene of _The Royal Lieutenant_, written to
celebrate the hundredth recurrence of Goethe's birthday, is laid in the
Seven Years' War in the house of Goethe's father in Frankfurt. The
Riccaut-like figure of the Royal Lieutenant himself, Count Thorane, and
his outlandish attemp