whom it was given to assert the dignity of vernacular literature, to throw off the yoke of classical tyranny, and to claim for all the dialects of Teutonic speech a right of ancient inheritance and perfect freedom before unsuspected and unknown. It is almost needless to mention this honoured name. For the furtherance of the good work which he began nearly fifty years ago, he still lives[1] and still labours. There is no spot on which an accent of Teutonic speech is uttered where the name of Jacob Grimm is not a "household word." His General Grammar of all the Teutonic Dialects from Iceland to England has proved the equality of these tongues with their ancient classical oppressors. His Antiquities of Teutonic Law have shewn that the codes of the Lombards, Franks, and Goths were not mere savage, brutal customaries, based, as had been supposed, on the absence of all law and right.. His numerous treatises on early German authors have shewn that the German poets of the Middle Age, Godfrey of Strasburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Hartmann von der Aue, Walter von der Vogelweide, and the rest, can hold their own against any contemporary writers in other lands. And lastly, what rather concerns us here, his Teutonic Mythology, his Reynard the Fox, and the collection of German Popular Tales, which he and his brother William published, have thrown a flood of light on the early history of all the branches of our race, and have raised what had come to be .looked on as mere nursery fictions and old wives' fables—to a study fit for the energies of grown men, and to all the dignity of a science.
- ↑ [He died in 1863. This Introduction was written in 1858.]
