which has been most of all devoted to the practice of 'Art,' then a
nation is not necessarily free, strong, moral, or happy because it
can 'represent' facts, or can understand how other people have
represented them. We do not hesitate to go farther, and to say that
the now past weakness of Germany was to be traced in a great degree
to that pernicious habit of mind which made her educated men fancy it
enough to represent noble thoughts and feelings, or to analyse the
representations of them: while they did not bestir themselves, or
dream that there was a moral need for bestirring themselves, toward
putting these thoughts and feelings into practice. Goethe herein was
indeed the type of a very large class of Germans: God grant that no
generation may ever see such a type common in England; and that our
race, remembering ever that the golden age of the English drama was
one of private immorality, public hypocrisy, ecclesiastical pedantry,
and regal tyranny, and ended in the temporary downfall of Church and
Crown, may be more ready to do fine things than to write fine books;
and act in their lives, as those old Puritans did, a drama which
their descendants may be glad to put on paper for them long after
they are dead.

For surely these Puritans were dramatic enough, poetic enough,
picturesque enough. We do not speak of such fanatics as Balfour of
Burley, or any other extravagant person whom it may have suited
Walter Scott to take as a typical personage. We speak of the average
Puritan nobleman, gentleman, merchant, or farmer; and hold him to
have been a picturesque and poetical man,--a man of higher
imagination and deeper feeling than the average of court poets; and a
man of sound taste also. What is to be said for his opinions about
the stage has been seen already: but it seems to have escaped most
persons' notice, that either all England is grown very foolish, or