he had hardly time to enjoy the idea that he had altered the whole expression of the juvenile countenance from mortification to extreme delight and happiness, than he became tortured with the idea that he might be the cause of the child's death, since the fruit he had bestowed upon it might occasion a surfeit or some other fatal disease. This presentiment haunted him until he reached the house of a friend, and it was akin to many which persecuted him during life, never leaving him to enjoy the satisfaction of a kind or benevolent action, and poisoning with the vague prospect of imaginary evil whatever was in its immediate tendency productive of present pleasure or promising future happiness. We cannot here avoid contrasting the character of Hoffmann with that of the highly imaginative poet Wordsworth, many of whose smaller poems turn upon a sensibility affected by such small incidents as that above mentioned, with this remarkable difference that the virtuous, and manly, and wellregulated disposition of the author leads him to derive pleasing, tender, and consoling reflections from those circumstances which induced Hoffmann to anticipate consequences of a different character. Such petty incidents are passed noteless over by men of ordinary minds. Observers of poetical imagination, like Wordsworth and Hoffmann, are the chemists who can distil them into cordials or poisons. We do not mean to say that the imagination of Hoffmann was either wicked or corrupt, but only that it was ill-regulated, and had an undue tendency to the horrible and the distressing. Thus he was followed, especially in his hours of solitude and study, by the apprehension of mysterious danger to which he conceived himself exposed; and the whole tribe of demi-gorgons, apparitions, and fanciful spectres and goblins of all kinds with which he has filled his pages, although in fact the children of his own imagination, were no less discomposing to him than if they had had a real existence and actual influence upon him. The visions which his fancy excited are stated often to be so lively, that he was unable to endure them; and (in the night, which was often his time of study, he was accustomed frequently to call his wife up from bed, that she might sit by him while he was writing, and protect him by her presence from the phantoms conjured up by his own excited imagination. Thus was the inventor, or at least first distinguished artist who exhibited the fantastic or supernatural grotesque in his compositions, so nearly on the verge of actual insanity, as to be afraid of the beings his own fancy created. It is no wonder that to a mind so vividly accessible to the influence of the imagination, so little under the dominion of sober reason, such a numerous train of ideas should occur in which fancy had a large share and reason none at all. In fact, the grotesque in his compositions partly resembles the arabesque in painting, in which is introduced the most strange and complicated monsters, resembling centaurs, griffins, sphinxes, chimeras, rocs, and all other creatures of romantic imagination, dazzling the beholder as it were by the unbounded fertility of the author's imagination, and sating it by the rich contrast of all the varieties of shape and colouring, while there is in reality nothing to satisfy the understanding or inform the judgment. Hoffmann spent his life, which could not be a happy one, in weaving webs of this wild and imaginative character, for which after all he obtained much less credit with the public, than his talents must have gained if exercised under the restraint of a better taste or a more solid judgment. There is much reason to think that his life was shortened not only by his mental malady, of which it is the appropriate quality to impede digestion and destroy the healthful exercise of the powers of the stomach, but also by the indulgences to which he had recourse in order to secure himself against the melancholy, which operated so deeply upon the constitution of his mind. This was the more to be regretted, as, notwithstanding the dreams of an overheated imagination, by which his taste appears to have been so strangely misled, Hoffmann seems to have been a man of excellent disposition, a close observer of nature, and one who if this sickly and disturbed train of thought had not led him to confound the supernatural with the absurd, would have distinguished himself as a painter of human nature, of which in its realities he was an observer and an admirer. Hoffmann was particularly skilful in depicting characters arising in his own country of Germany. Nor is there any of her numerous authors who have better and more faithfully designed the upright honesty and firm integrity which is to be met with in all classes which come from the ancient Teutonic stock. There is one character in particular in the tale called" Der Majorat" the Entail-which is perhaps peculiar to Germany, and which makes a magnificent contrast to the same class of persons as described in romances, and as existing perhaps in real life in other countries. The justiciary B- bears about the same office in the family of the Baron Roderick von R, a nobleman possessed of vast estates in Courland, which the generally-known Bailie Macwheeble occupied on the land of the Baron of Bradwardine. The justiciary, for example, was the representative of the seigneur in his feudal courts of justice; he superintended his revenues, regulated and controlled his household, and from his long acquaintance with the affairs of the family, was entitled to interfere both with advice and assistance in any case of peculiar necessity. In such a character, the Scottish author has permitted himself to introduce a strain of the roguery supposed to be incidental to the inferior classes of the law,—maybe no unnatural ingredient. The bailie is mean, sordid, a trickster, and a coward, redeemed only from our dislike and contempt by the ludicrous qualities of his character, by a considerable degree of shrewdness, and by the species of almost instinctive attachment to his master and his family, which seem to overbalance in quality the natural selfishness of his dispo sition. The justiciary of R is the very reverse of this character. He is indeed an original: having the peculiarities of age and some of its satirical peevishness; but in his moral qualities he is well described by La Motte Fouqué, as a hero of ancient days in the night-gown and slippers of an old lawyer of the present age. The innate worth, independence, and resolute courage of the justiciary seem to be rather enhanced than diminished by his education and profession, which naturally infers an accurate knowledge of mankind, and which, if practised without honour and honesty, is the basest and most dangerous fraud which an individual can put upon the public. Perhaps a few lines of Crabbe may describe the general tendency of the justiciary's mind, although marked, as we shall show, by loftier traits of character than those which the English poet has assigned to the worthy attorney of his borough :— "He, roughly honest, has been long a guide 'Twixt needy vice and tempting villany." The justiciary of Hoffmann, however, is of a higher character than the person distinguished by Crabbe. Having known two generations of the |