The regular novels of Göthe are of a very questionable sort. The vivacity of his imagination and fineness of feeling supply good individual pictures and acute remarks; but they cannot be praised either for incident or character. They are often stained, too, with the degrada tion to which he unfortunately reduces love, where liking and vice follow fast upon each other. "The Apprenticeship of William Meister," for instance, is a very readable book, in so far as it contains a great deal of acute and eloquent criticism; but who would purchase the criticism, even of Göthe, at the expence of the licentiousness of incident and pruriency of description, with which the book teems? He now devotes himself chiefly to philosophical and critical disquisitions

on the fine arts.

It is scarcely possible for a man who has written so much, not to have written

much that is mediocre. Göthe, having long since reached that point of reputation at which the name of an author is identified, in the eyes of his countrymen, with the excellence of his work, has been frequently overrated, and men are not awanting who augur that the best of his fame is past. But he can well afford to make many allowances for the excesses into which popular enthusiasm, like popular dislike, is so easily misled; for there will always remain an abundance of original, and varied, and powerful genius, to unite his name for ever with the literature of his country. He himself said truly of Schiller, that where the present age had been deficient, posterity would be profuse; and the prophecy is already receiving its fulfilment. To Göthe the

present has been lavish, and the future will not be unjust. From his youth, he has been the favourite of fortune and fame; he has reached the brink of the grave, hailed by the voice of his country as the foremost of her great, the patriarch of her literature, and the model of her genius. In his old age, wrapped up in the seclusion of Weimar, so becoming his years and so congenial to his habits, he hears no sounds but those of eulogy and affection. Like an eastern potentate,

or a jealous deity, he looks abroad from

his retirement on the intellectual world which he has formed by his precept or his example; he pronounces the oracular doom, or sends forth a revelation, and men wait on him to venerate and obey. Princes are proud to be his companions; less elevated men approach him with awe, as a higher spirit: and when Göthe shall follow the kindred minds whom he has seen pass away before him, Weimar will have lost the last pillar of her fame, and

in the literature of Germany there will be a vacant throne.

Our author next visits Jena, which and after retailing some popular is only a short distance from Weimar; anecdotes of the celebrated battle, which humbled the Prussian monarchy to the dust, he proceeds to give an account of the mode of edu cation pursued at that notorious University, and of the character and habits of the young men who frequent it, with a few short but interesting notices of the more distinguished Professors. The radical defect by which the system of education in all the German Universities is more or less vitiated, and which leads to much of the insubordination by which they are disgraced, consists in not restricting, with sufficient rigour, each Professor to a particular department. By the constitution of these bodies, any Professor may, in fact, teach any branch he pleases; he is indeed compelled to give one or more public lectures on the subject which he ostensibly professes; but then he may give private lectures on any, or all of the departments of human knowledge. This, with their small salaries, leads to a scramble for pupils; the Professors wish to stand well with the young men; and, as less lads, he is the greatest favourite will always happen among thoughtwho is the least severe, and who is disposed to hold the reins of discipline with the most accommodating hand. Hence naturally arise all the irregularity and absurdity by which these seminaries have so long been disgraced, and which have not only justified the summary interfe rence of the governments, but rendered it in many instances imperatively necessary. The practice of renowning, as it is called, or in other words, of doing any thing extrava always it will attract notice, and such gant, outré, and wicked, provided associations as the Landsmannschaft and the Burschenschaft, could not exist a single day, (notwithstanding all the means of concealment to which the young men have recourse,) if the Professors were sternly kept each to his appropriate department, and a proper and uncompromising system of Academical discipline adopted and enforced. This is proved

by the comparative good order which has always existed at Göttingen, though more numerously attended than either Jena, or any other of the German Universities, and which, though defective in the point above alluded to, (of suffering the Professors to interfere with one another's departments,) has been very properly compelled by the Government to tighten the reins of authority, and to preserve some sort of decorum and subordination. It is no less ridiculous than extraordinary, that a parcel of raw and beardless youths should be suffered to lord it over their masters by their violence and impudence,-to fight duels, renown,-besot themselves with beer and tobacco,-wander through the streets at all hours of the night, sing ing licentious or traitorous songs,insult the peaceable citizens, and, in short, commit any wild freak which they may take into their crazy noddles, merely because such is their sovereign will and pleasure ; and it is the very ne plus ultra of all folly and extravagance, to hear of such striplings setting themselves forth as the apostles of liberty, and denominating themselves the patterns of all human virtue, and the political regenerators of their country. Pretty regenerators! Admirable patterns of virtue of which, by the way, we may form a pretty accurate conception from the circumstance, that a Foundling Hospital is, in every town where a University is established, an institution of the first necessity.

On leaving Jena, our author visits Leipsig, the great book-mart of Germany. We do not know how Meinherr Brockhaus will relish the following exposé of the mysteries of The Trade.

As Frankfort monopolizes the trade in wine, so Leipzig monopolizes the trade in books. It is here that every German author (and in no country are authors so numerous) wishes to produce the children of his brain, and that, too, only during the Easter fair. He will submit to any degree of exertion, that his work may be ready for publication by that important season, when the whole brotherhood is in labour, from the Rhine to the Vistula. Whatever the period of gestation may be, the time when he shall come to the birth

is fixed by the Almanack. If the auspicious moment pass away, he willingly bears his burden twelve months longer, till the next advent of the Bibliopolical Lucina. This periodical littering at Leipzig does not at all arise, as is sometimes supposed, from all or most of the books being printed there; Leipzig has only its own proportion of printers and publishers. It arises from the manner in which this branch of trade is carried on in Germany. Every bookseller of any eminence, throughout the Confederation, has an agent or commissioner in Leipzig. If he wishes to procure works which have been published by another, he does not address himself directly to the publisher, but to his own commissioner in Leipzig. This is not all, for the latter, whether he be

ordered to transmit to another books

published by his principal, or to procure ther, instead of dealing directly with the for his principal books published by anoperson from whom he is to purchase, or to whom he is to sell, treats only with his Leipzig agent. The order is received by the publisher, and the books by the purchaser at third hand. The whole booktrade of Germany thus centres in Leipzig. Wherever books may be printed, it is there they must be bought; it is there that the trade is supplied. Such an arrangement, though it employ four persons in every sale instead of two, is plainly an advantageous arrangement for Leipzig; but the very fact, that it has subsisted two hundred years, and still flourishes, seems to prove that it is likewise found to be beneficial to the trade in general. Abuses in public institutions may endure for centuries; but inconvenient arrangements in trade, which affect the credit side of a man's balance-sheet at the end of the year, are seldom so long-lived. German booksellers, moreover, are not less attentive to profit than any other honest men in an honest business. They even reckon among the advantages of this system, the saving which it enables them to make in the article of carriage. If a bookseller in Berlin has ordered books from Vienna, Strasburg, Munich, Stuttgard, and a dozen other places, they are all deposited with his Leipzig agent, who then forwards them in one mass much more cheaply than if each portion had been sent separately and directly to Berlin.

Till the middle of the sixteenth century, publishers, in the proper sense of the word, were unknown. John Otto, born at Nürnberg in 1510, is said to be the earliest on record who made bargains for copy-right, without being himself a printer. Some years afterwards, two regular dealers in the same department

settled in Leipzig, where the university, already in high fame, had produced a demand for books, from the moment the art of printing wandered up from the Rhine. Before the end of the century, the book-fair was established. It prospered so rapidly, that, in 1600, the Easter catalogue, which has been annually continued ever since, was printed for the first time.

It now presents every year, in a thick octavo volume, a collection of new books and new editions, to which there is no parallel in Europe. The writing public is out of all proportion too large for the reading public of Germany. At the fair, all the brethren of the trade flock together in Leipzig, not only from every part of Germany, but from every European country where German books are sold, to settle accounts, and examine the harvest of the year. The number always amounts to several hundreds, and they have built an exchange for themselves.

Yet a German publisher has less chance of making great profits, and a German author has fewer prospects of turning his manuscript to good account, than the same classes of persons in any other country that knows the value of intellectual labour. There is a pest called Nachdrückerei, or Reprinting, which gnaws on the vitals of the poor author, and paralyzes the most enterprising publisher. Each State of the Confederation has its own law of copy-right; and an author is se cured against piracy only in the state where he prints. But he writes for all, for they all speak the same language. If the book be worth any thing, it is immediately reprinted in some neighbouring state, and, as the reprinter pays nothing for copy-right, he can obviously afford to undersell the original publisher. Wirtemberg, though she can boast of possessing in Cotta one of the most honourable and enterprising publishers of Germany, is peculiarly notorious as a nest for these birds of prey. There are various wellknown booksellers who scarcely drive any other branch of trade. So soon as a book appears which promises to sell well, they put forth a cheaper edition, which drives the legitimate one from the market, and nothing remains for the publisher but to buy off the rascally pirate with any sum which his rapacity may demand. The worst of it is, that authors of reputation are precisely those to whom this system is most fatal. The reprinter meddles with nothing except what he already knows will find buyers. The rights of unsaleable books are scrupulously observ. ed; the honest publisher is never dis turbed in his losing speculations; but,

when he has been fortunate enough to become master of a work of genius or utility, the piratical publisher is instantly in his way. All the states do not deserve to be equally involved in this censure. Prussia, I believe, has shown herself liberal in protecting every German pub. lisher. Some of the utterly insignificant states are among the most troublesome, for reprinting can be carried on in a small just as well as in a great one. The bookseller who published Reinhardt's Sermons was attacked by a reprint, which was announced as about to appear at Reutlingen, in Wirtemberg. The pirate demanded fourteen thousand florins, nearly twelve hundred pounds, to give up his design. The publisher thought that so exorbitant a demand justified him in applying to the Government, but all he could gain was the limitation of the sum to a thousand pounds.

Such a system almost annihilates the value of literary labour. No publisher can pay a high price for a manuscript, by which, if it turn out ill, he is sure to be a loser, and by which, if it turn out well, it is far from certain that he will be a gainer. From the value which he might otherwise be inclined to set on the copyright, he must always deduct the sum which it probably will be necessary to expend in buying off reprinters, or he must calculate that value on the supposition of a very limited circulation. At what rate would Mr Murray pay Lord Byron, or Mr Constable take the manuscript of the Scottish Novels, if the statute protected the one only in the county of Middlesex, and the other only in the county of Edinburgh? Hence it is that German authors, though the most industrious, are likewise the worst remunerated of the writing tribe. I have heard it said, that Göthe has received for some of his works about a louis d'or a sheet, and it is certain that he has made much money by them; but 1 have often likewise heard the statement questioned as incredible. Bürger, in his humorous epistle to Gökingk, estimates poetry at a pound per sheet; law and medicine at five shillings.

The unpleasing exterior of ordinary German printing, the coarse watery paper, and worn-out types, must be referred, in some measure, to the same cause. The publisher, or the author who publishes on his own account, naturally risks as little capital as possible in the hazardous speculation. Besides, it is his interest to diminish the temptation to reprint, by making his own edition as cheap as may be. The system has shown its effects, too, in keeping up the frequency of publication by subscription, even among

authors of the most settled and popular reputation. Klopstock, after the Messiah had fixed his fame, published in this way. There has been no more successful pub lisher than Cotta, and no German writer has been so well repaid as Göthe; yet the last Täbingen edition of Göthe himself is adorned with a long list of subscribers. What would we think of Byron, or Camp. bell, or Scott, or Moore, publishing a new poem by subscription ?

Mr. Brockhaus is allowed to be the most efficient publisher in Leipzig, and consequently among the first in Germany. He is a writer, too, for, on miscellaneous, particularly political topics, he frequently supplies his own manuscript. He is sup. posed to have made a fortune by one work on which he ventured, the Conversations-Lexicon, a very compendious Encyclopædia. The greatest fault of the book is a want of due selection; personages of eternal name, and topics of immutable interest, are contracted or omitted, to make way for men and matters that only enjoy a local and passing notoriety. Even a Britannica, with a Supplement, should not waste its pages on short-lived topics, and only the quinta pars nectaris of human knowledge and biography should be admitted into an Encyclopædia of ten oc

tavo volumes. The book, however, has had a very extensive circulation, and often forms the whole library of a person in the middling classes. It would have proved still more lucrative, had the writers, among whom are many of the most popular names of Germany, shown greater deference to the political creeds of the leading courts. The numerous political articles, not merely on subjects of general discussion, but on recent events, important and unimportant, are all on the liberal side of the question; moderate, indeed, argumentative, and respectful, but still pointing at the propriety of political changes. The book was admitted into the Russian dominions only in the form of an editio castigata; from this tree of knowledge were carefully shaken all the fruits which might enable the nations to distinguish between good and evil before it was allowed to be transplanted beyond the Vistula. Even in this ameliorated state, it began to be regarded as, at least, lurid, if not downright poisonous, and ultimately was prohibited altogether.

Brockhaus is, by way of eminence, the liberal publisher of Germany. He shuns no responsibility, and stands in constant communication with all the popular journalists and pamphleteers. His Zeitgenosse, or, The Contemporary, was a journal entirely devoted to politics. It frequently contained translations of leading political

VOL. XIV.

articles from the Edinburgh Review; and these, again, were sometimes reprinted and circulated as pamphlets. The Hermes is of the same general character, a quarterly publication, which apes in form, as well as matter, one of our most celebrated journals. In 1821, his weekly journal, The Conversationes-Wochenblatt, was prohibited in Berlin, and shortly af terwards, it was thought necessary to erect a separate department of the Censorship for the sole purpose of examining and licensing Brockhaus's publications. The prohibition was speedily removed, and I believe (but I had left Berlin before it happened) that likewise the separate censorial establishment was of brief duration. Brockhaus has brought himself out of all political embarrassments, with great agility and good fortune, and still rails on at despots and reprinters,

In the gay and elegant capital of Saxony, where men who please to live, live to please, our author is of course enraptured with the paternal government of the King, the frank and engaging manners of the people, and, above all, the treasures of the picture-gallery, on which no French spoliator was permitted to fasten his ravenous fangs. Leaving this part of his work, however, for the special consideration of the Dilletante Society, if it still exist in rerum naturâ, our taste leads us to prefer an extract illustrative of the manner in which criminal justice is administered in that country. The abuses engendered, under a despotic government, in a matter where the interests of the great body of the people are so directly and vitally concerned, were never before placed in a stronger light.

Having heard a professor of Jena rail, in his lecture, at the mal-administration of English prisons, in a style which I suspected no German was entitled to use, who looked nearer home, I took occasion to visit one of the prisons of Dresden. It was crowded with accused as well as condemned, and seemed to have all the usual defects of ill-regulated gaols, both as to the health and moral welfare of its inmates. They were deposited in small dark cells, each of which contained three prisoners; a few boards, across which a coarse mat was thrown, supplied the place of a bed, and the cells were overheated. Many of the prisoners were persons whose guilt had not yet been ascertained; but, possible as their innocence 5 A

might be, it was to soine the sixth, the eighth, even the twelfth month of this demoralizing confinement. One young man, whom the gaoler allowed to be a respect. able person, had been pining for months, without knowing, as he said, why he was there. The allegation might be of very doubtful truth, but the procrastinated suffering, without any definite point of termination, was certain. Till the judge shall find time to condemn them to the highway, or dismiss them as innocent, they must languish on in these corrupting triumvirates, in dungeons, compared with which the cell they would be removed to, if condemned to die, is a comfortable abode. I could easily believe the assur ance of the gaoler, that they uniformly leave the prison worse than they entered

it.

Such arrangements, under a system of criminal law like that which prevails all over Germany, are hideous; because it is a system which sets no determinate limit to the duration of this previous confine ment. The length of imprisonment of an accused person depends, not on the law, but on the judge, or those who are above the judge. The law having once got the man into gaol, does not seem to trouble itself any farther about him. There are instances, and recent ones, too, of persons being dismissed as innocent, after a five years' preparatory imprisonment. People, to be sure, shake their heads at such things, with " aye, it was very hard on the poor man, but the court could no sooner arrive at the certainty of his guilt or innocence." No doubt, it is better, as they allege, that a man should be unjustly imprisoned five years, than unjustly hanged at the end of the first; but they cannot see that, if there was no good ground for hanging him at the end of the first, neither could there be any for keep ing him in gaol during the other four. They insist on the necessity of discover. ing the truth. Where there are suspi. cious circumstances, though they acknow ledge it would be wrong to convict the man, they maintain it would be equally wrong to liberate him, and therefore fairly conclude that he must remain in prison "till the truth comes out." To get at the certain truth is a very excellent thing; but it is a very terrible thing, that a man must languish in prison during a period indefinite by law, till his judges discover with certainty whether he should ever have been there or not. The secrecy in which all judicial proceedings are wrapt up, at once diminishes the apparent number of such melancholy abuses, and prevents the public mind from being much affected by those which become partially known.

All this leads to another practice, which, however it may be disguised, is nothing else than the torture. It is a rule, in all capital offences, not to inflict the punishment, however clear the evidence may be, without a confession by the culprit himself. High treason, I believe, is a practical exception. In it the head must go off, whether the mouth opens or not. In all other capital crimes, though there should not be a hook to hang a doubt upon, yet, if the culprit deny, he is only condemned to, perhaps, perpetual impri sonment. There is no getting rid of the dilemma, that, in the opinion of the man's judges, his guilt is either clearly proved, or it is not. If it be clearly proved, then the whole punishment, if not, then no punishment at all should be inflicted; otherwise suspicions are visited as crimes, and a man is treated as a criminal, because it is doubtful whether he be one or not. If his judges think that his denial proceeds merely from obstinacy, he is consigned to a dungeon, against whose horrors, to judge from the one I was shown, innocence itself could not long hold out; for death on the scaffold would be a far easier and more immediate liberation, than the mortality which creeps over every limb in such a cell. It is a cold, damp, subterraneous hole; the roof is so low, that the large drops of moisture distilling from above must trickle immediately on the miserable inmate; its dimensions are so confined, that a man could not stretch out his limbs at full length. Its only furniture is wet straw, scantily strewed on the wet ground. There is not the smallest opening or cranny to admit either light or air; a prisoner could not even discern the crust of bread and jug of water allotted to support life in a place where insensibility would be a blessing. I am not describing any relique of antiquated barbarity; the cell is still in most efficient operation. About four years ago, it was inhabited by a woman convicted of murder. As she still denied the crime, her judges, who had no pretence for doubt, sent her to this dungeon to extort a confession. At the end of a fortnight, her obstinacy gave way; when she had just strength enough left to totter to the scaffold, she confessed the murder exactly as it had been proved against her.

Such a practice is revolting to all good feeling, even when viewed as a punishment; when used before condemnation, to extort a confession, in what imaginable point does it differ from the torture? Really we could almost be tempted to believe, that it is not without some view to future utility, that, in a more roomy apartment adjoining this infamous dun