ran counter to his." He adds, "I have neither forgot nor forgiven it; and I have a great mind to force him to cancel Lalla Rookh, for stealing it wholly from The Queen's Wake, which is so apparent in the plan, that every London judge will give it in my favour.... He had better have left my trivial songs alone." The ballad, "Donald M'Gillavry," was originally published in the Jacobite Relics (vol. i.), and Hogg chuckles mightily to think that by omitting to state that it was an original composition of his own, the Edinburgh Review was "entrapped into a high but unintentional compliment to the author," and that the sagacious critic selected, as the best specimen of the true old Jacobite song, "a trifle of his (Hogg's) own, which he put in to fill up a page!"
XXII.—THE BARON VON GOETHE.
For the exquisite prose sketch which accompanied this portrait on its first appearance at the court of "Regina," was called into requisition the pen of an Englishman of letters who, at that time, and even now, may be said to have done more than any other scholar to bring his countrymen acquainted with the riches of German literature. I need hardly say that I allude to Thomas Carlyle, among whose Critical and Miscellaneous Essays this smaller gem is included. Nothing would have given me greater satisfaction than to quote so beautiful and characteristic a piece of writing in its entirety; but as it is so readily accessible, I content myself with pointing out its character, and the place where it is to be found. The portrait which it so happily illustrates, and which is here before us, was not taken ad vivum, but copied from one by Stieler of Munich. "It proved," says a note to my edition,—an American one,—of Carlyle, "a total failure and involuntary caricature,—resembling, as was said at the time, a wretched old-clothes man, carrying behind his back a hat which he seemed to have stolen." This passage I only transcribe to express some dissent from the opinion expressed in it, the portrait,—this copy of which is set down to Thackeray, with much probability, in the Autographic Mirror, 1864,—appearing to me, in many respects, a worthy and suggestive resemblance of the great patriarch of German literature, and indicating to some extent that decision of character and potency of will, by means of which, as we are told, he was once able to ward off an infectious fever by which he was menaced.
It is as the author of Faust[1] that Goethe here appears before us, and it is probably with this divine production that his name is still, and ever will be, more intimately associated, than with any other of his works, transcendantly great as many of them are. I was yet young in German when I commenced the study of this immortal work, and knew little of it besides
- ↑ This poem, which is styled by Bunsen "Die Tragödie der Seele," was commenced as far back as 1774, when some of the episodes were sketched out. The whole was remodelled in 1790 by the author, when the first separate edition, entitled Faust ein Fragment, was given to the world. But the complete poem, such as we now possess it, was not published till 1806.
