as the real founder of the German village story.

The frontispiece, Karl Spitzweg's _Garret Window_, introduces a master
of German genre painting who in a later volume will be more fully
represented.

KUNO FRANCKE.

* * * *




THE NOVEL OF PROVINCIAL LIFE


By EDWIN C. ROEDDER, PH.D.

Associate Professor of German Philology, University of Wisconsin

To Rousseau belongs the credit of having given, in his passionate cry
"Back to Nature!" the classic expression to the consciousness that all
the refinements of civilization do not constitute life in its truest
sense. The sentiment itself is thousands of years old. It had inspired
the idyls of Theocritus in the midst of the magnificence and luxury of
the courts of Alexandria and Syracuse. It reëchoed through the pages of
Virgil's bucolic poetry. It made itself heard, howsoever faintly, in the
artificiality and sham of the pastoral plays from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century. And it was but logical that this sentiment should
seek its most adequate and definitive expression in a portrayal of all