live to finish, nor is it thought he could have finished it. His smaller pieces were mostly written for transitory publications, and too often with only a transitory excellence. We do not read them without interest, without high amusement; but the second reading pleases worst than the first: for there is too little meaning in that bright extravagance; it is but the hurried copy of the phantasms which forever masqueraded through the author's mind; it less resembles the creation of a poet, than the dream of an opium-eater.
With these faults a rigorous criticism may charge Hoffmann; and this the more strictly, the greater his talent, the more undoubted his capability and obligation to avoid them. At the same time, to reject his claim, as has been done, to what the poets call their immortality, seems hard measure. If Callot and Teniers, his models, still figure in picturegalleries; if Rabelais continues, after centuries, to be read, and even the Caliph Vathek, after decades, still finds admirers, the products of a mind so brilliant, wild and singular as that of Hoffmann may long hover in the remembrance of the world; as objects of curiosity, of censure, and, on the whole, compared with absolute Nonentity, of entertainment and partial approval. For the present at least, as a child of his time and his country, he is not to be overlooked in any survey of German Literature, and least of all by the foreign student of it.
Among Hoffmann's shorter performances, I find Meister Martin noted by his critics as the most perfect: it is a story of ancient Nürnberg, and worked up in a style which even reminds us of the Author of Waverley. Nevertheless, I have selected this Goldne Topf, as likelier to interest the English reader: it has more of the faults, but also more of the excellences peculiar to its author, and exhibits a much truer picture of his individuality. To recommend it, criticisms would be unavailing: there is no deep art involved in its composition; to minds alive to the graces of Fancy, and disposed to pardon even its aberrations when splendid and
