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you, but only a little nettled; for can any thing be more provoking than to have one's ears tormented incessantly with praises of every thing German, by a set of blockheads, male and female, who know nothing of the subject, and take all that the Germans themselves advance for gospel? Depend upon it, sir, hundreds of young ladies can repeat stanzas of Gleim and Utss, who never read a line of Spencer in their lives. So let us go back to Gottshed. Did you ever meet with his collection of plays called the German Theatre? A lucky man if you haven't, for such a load of trash was never before brought together in one heap since the days of Augeus. Translation, or more properly, as they themselves call it, "oversetting," is the loftiest of their flights. And such translations! Corneille, Racine, Germanized, and by the hand of John Christoph himself; hand more fit to stuff sausages than translate the Cid or Iphiginie. And even in this cabbaging and pilfering how limited was their range! The Danish and French seem to be the only tongues they had the command of English was a fountain sealed, and a well shut up from them, till some French depredator had first melted the wax and picked the padlock. But, gracious heaven, Mr North, how they dirtied the water! And who was it, after all, whom they translated or imitated? Not Johnson not Shakspeare nor even glorious John. Who then? Addison!—The Drummer, which even in English is a wonderfully stupid performance for the creator of Sir Roger de Coverly, is tortured into more Teutonic dulness in a close translation; and Gottshed founds his claim to supremacy as an original author on his tragedy of Cato. Stars and Garters! bob-wigs and shoe-buckles! what a Cato! Addison's is poor enough, and spouts like a village schoolmaster in his fifth tumbler; and virtuous Marcia towers above her sex like a matron of the Penitentiary; but Gottshed's Cato is a cut above all this. Shall I give you the Dramatis Personæ? Here they are in my note-book.

What do you think of that, sir? And what do you think of Arscne who has been brought up by Arsaces, and by him been made Queen of the Parthians, turning out in the third act to be Cato's daughter, and shockingly in love with Cæsar? Think of all this, sir, and of the prodigious orations between the two heroes in rhyming Alexandrines, and you will rejoice as I did that the long-winded old patriot put himself to death. It is the only consolation one has all through the play to know that in the fifth act justice will be executed on all and sundry; for Gottshed does not spare an inch of the cold steel.

But why do I lay such stress on poor old buried and forgotten John Christoph?—I'll trouble you for the kettle—The reason is very plain; I want to find out some excuse for the Germans having formed such an exaggerated estimate of their present school—and I think I have found it in the profundity of the abyss they were sunk in before it made its appearance. People in a coal-pit see the smaller stars at mid day as plain as if each of them were of the first magnitude. The deeper they go down, the brighter shines the twinkler; so that when the Leipsic public had fallen into the depths of Gottshedism, no wonder that, on the first rising of Wieland, they considered him the sun in heaven. Then shone Klopstock, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe forming—as seen from that subterranean level—a whole planetary system. But for us English, sir, to look up to such lights—to talk of them in the same century with our own—or to think they are fitted to be classed with those glorious constellations that illumine the British sky, and shed their glory over all lands—the thing is beyond joke—'tis monstrous. Contrast them, Klopstock—Milton; Schiller—Shakspeare; Lessing—Dryden; Goethe—Walter Scott; and as to their small fry, Sam Johnson would have swal-