MAX MÜLLER, M.A. FELLOW OF ALL SOULS. TAFLORIAN PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE AT OXFORD. LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, LONGMANS, AND ROBERTS. PREFACE. THESE extracts from German writers, beginning with Ulfilas in the fourth, and ending with Jean Paul Friedrich Richter in the nineteenth century, were originally collected for the purpose of illustrating a course of Lectures on the History of the German Language and Literature, delivered by me at Oxford, in the years 1853 and 1856. There is no country where so much interest is taken in the literature of Germany as in England, as there is no country where the literature of England is so much appreciated as in Germany. Some of our modern classics, whether poets or philosophers, are read by Englishmen with the same attention as their own; and the historians, the novelwriters, and the poets of England have exercised, and continue to exercise, a most powerful and beneficial influence on the people of Germany. In recent times, the literature of the two countries has almost grown into one. Lord Macaulay's History has not only been translated into German, but reprinted at Leipzig in the original; and it is said to have had a larger sale in Germany than the work of any German historian. Baron Humboldt and Baron Bunsen address their writings to the English as much as to the German public. The novels of Dickens and Thackeray are expected with the same impatience at Leipzig and Berlin as in London. The two great German classics, Schiller and Göthe, have found their most successful biographers in Carlyle and Lewes; and several works of German scholarship have met with more attentive and thoughtful readers in the colleges of England, than in the universities of Germany. Göthe's idea of a world-literature has, to a certain extent, been realised; and the strong feel |