literature dwells "with peculiar complacency among wizards and ruined
towers, with mailed knights, secret tribunals, monks, specters, and
banditti. . . If any man will insist on taking Heinse's 'Ardinghello'
and Miller's 'Siegwart,' the works of Veit Weber the Younger, and above
all the everlasting Kotzebue,[30] as his specimens of German literature,
he may establish many things. Black Forests and the glories of
Lubberland, sensuality and horror, the specter nun and the charmed
moonshine shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws also, with huge
whiskers and the most cat-o'-mountain aspect; tear-stained
sentimentalists, the grimmest man-haters, ghosts and the like suspicious
characters will be found in abundance. We are little read in this
bowl-and-dagger department; but we do understand it to have been at one
time rather diligently cultivated; though at present it seems to be
mostly relinquished. . . What should we think of a German critic that
selected his specimens of British literature from 'The Castle Specter,'
Mr. Lewis' 'Monk,' or the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and 'Frankenstein, or
the Modern Prometheus'?. . . 'Faust,' for instance, passes with many of
us for a mere tale of sorcery and art magic. It would scarcely be more
unwise to consider 'Hamlet' as depending for its main interest on the
ghost that walks in it."[31]

Now for the works here named, as for the whole class of melodramas and
melodramatic romances which swarmed in Germany during the last quarter of
the century and made their way into English theaters and circulating
libraries, in the shape of translations, adaptations, imitations, two
plays were remotely responsible: Goethe's "Götz" (1773), with its robber
knights, secret tribunal, imperialist troopers, gypsies, and insurgent
peasants; and Schiller's "Die Räuber" (1781), with its still more violent
situations and more formidable _dramatis personae_. True, this spawn of
the _Sturm- und Drangzeit_, with its dealings in banditti, monks,