Christian Gellert and other Sketches. London: Low, 1858. Post 8vo. Ivo: a Village Tale from the Black Forest. Translated from the German by META TAYLOR, with four illustrations by JOHN ABSALON. 16mo. The Professor's Wife. A Tale, translated by M. HOWITT. London: Parker & Son, 1850. 12mo.

The Barefooted Maiden. A Tale. London: Low, 1857. 12mo.

Tagebuch aus Wien. Von Latour bis auf Windischgratz. September bis November, 1848. Breslau: Schletter, 1849.

Narrative of Events in Vienna. Translated by J. E. TAYLOR. 12mo. London: Bogue, 1849.

Andree Hofer. Geschichtliches Trauerspiel, in fünf Aufzügen. Leipzig: G. Wigand, 1850.

Deutscher Familienkalender auf das Jahr 1858. Mit Bildern (Holzschn.) nach Original-zeichn. Von W. v. KAULBACH, L. RICHTER und ARTHUR v. RAMBERG, u.s.w. Stuttgart: Cotta. 8vo.

Deutscher Volks-Kalender auf das Jahr 1859, u.s.w.

Der Wahlspruch. Schauspiel in fünf Acten. Leipzig: Weber, 1859. Joseph in Schnee. Eine Erzählung von B. AUERBACH. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1860.

Joseph in the Snow. Translated by Lady WALLACE. London: Saunders & Oakley. 3 vols. Post 8vo. 1861.

Edelweiss. Eine Erzählung von B. AUERBACH. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1861. Auf der Höhe.

Roman in acht Büchern, von BERTHOLD AUERBACH. Dritte Auflage. Stuttgart: Verlag der J. G. Cotta'schen Buchhandlung, 1866.

IN the Black Forest, in Wurtemberg, in the charming valley of the Neckar, is a village called Nordstetten, inhabited by a mixed population of Catholics and Jews, who live together quite in harmony. Berthold Auerbach was born in this village, in 1812, of Jewish parents. And it is to this circumstance of his Jewish birth, and the Christian influences that were about him from childhood, that many of the characteristics of his writings are to be traced. After receiving the rudiments of his education in the Talmud, in the dilapidated little old town of Hechingen, twenty or thirty miles distant, once the capital of the infinitesimal principality of that name, and which the traveller remembers because he drove out from it once to see the castle of the Hohenzollerns, the original nest of that black eagle that now flaps its wings over Germany, he went to complete his Jewish training at

Carlsruhe; but the obscure life of a Rabbi suited neither his tastes nor his ambition. And after having been for a time at the Gymnasium in Stuttgart, he entered the University at Tübingen. But, as he had been faithless to rabbinism, he soon deserted the study of jurisprudence, to which he had at first applied himself, and, under the guidance of the celebrated Strauss, he devoted himself to philosophy. His philosophical studies were continued at Munich, under Schelling; and, at Heidelberg, he studied history under Schlosser. Early involved in the political discussions of the day, in which he took the side of the people, he soon came into collision with the Government, which was as resolute in suppressing all free inquiry in the direction of politics as it was anxious to encourage it in every other. He was arrested at Munich, but was nevertheless soon released from durance; and, even while investigations were going on into the acts of the authors of the troubles in which he had taken part, he was permitted to continue his attendance upon the lectures at the University.

In Wurtemberg, however, he did not get off so easily; but was sentenced, in 1835, to expiate his political views in the dungeons of Hohenasperg, where the lives of so many noble patriots and thinkers had wasted away in solitude and misery; and where, but for that precipitate flight of which the story has been but rather recently told, the great genius of Schiller might have been extinguished in the madness of despair. The shadows which lay so dark, however, over the frowning Swabian height, do not seem to have affected the activity of Auerbach's mind; for he wrote in his prison a pamphlet entitled Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur ("Judaism, and the Latest Literature "), a pamphlet now long forgotten, if indeed it ever had any success. After being released from imprisonment, he set about writing a series of books under the collective title of The Ghetto (the term by which the Jewish quarter is designated in European cities); his purpose being to give a faithful picture of Jewish life in its poetical and historical aspects, before the levelling tendencies in modern manners and thought had

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wholly swept away its peculiarities, and buried in oblivion that treasure of oral traditions and tales of marvels which the Judaism of the Middle Age had accumulated.

He completed, however, but two of these books, -the first, which appeared in 1837, being entitled Spinoza, ein Denkerleben ("Spinoza, the Life of a Thinker "); and the second, which appeared in 1839, Dichter und Kaufmann, ein Lebensgemälde aus der Zeit Moses Mendelssohns ("Poet and Merchant, a Drawing from Life in the time of Moses Mendelssohn "). The former was a psychological and historical representation—founded upon a careful study of Spinoza's writings of the course of that philosopher's evolution, so to speak, out of the Jewish life and tradition into the broad fields of universal thought; while the latter, in the life of Moses Ephraim Kuh, the Jewish epigrammatist of Silesia, illustrated with a wealth of fancy the social condition of the Jews in the second half of the last century.

The Jews had as yet furnished no illustration of their own manners and mode of thought, unless it be in the expression of that feeling of servitude which makes the undertone of their writing, as of their life. Auerbach undertook to exhibit the real significance of Judaism, its habits and opinions, in a philosophical, but at the same time artistic, form. “Philosophy, science, civilization," says a French writer, “have all had their legends of heroes and martyrs." Has not Israel had its heroes and its martyrs too? Among the Jews of the Middle Age and the Renaissance and the later centuries, have there not been men who have fought and suffered for the human race? To paint these combats and these trials was to exhibit the Jews as zealously co-operating in the liberal movement of modern society, and so to do something to explode the restrictions which still hamper them. For this purpose, no better subject than Spinoza, and perhaps no better writer than Auerbach, could have been chosen.

Spinoza was one of those self-contained natures that either fascinate or repel us. Neither Goethe, who favored his phi losophy, nor Jacobi, who hated it, ever attempted to penetrate the character of the man. They merely took his phi

losophy, and made what they could of it. The influence, however, of Hegel had awakened a spirit of analysis which did not shrink even from the task of getting at the elements of such a character as Spinoza. The difficulty was, in doing so, to avoid adopting the ideas of Christianity as a standpoint, a difficulty which, of all writers, Auerbach was best fitted to surmount; for, like Spinoza himself, he had been bred up in the Talmud, and had afterwards worked his way out of the limitations of rabbinism into the freedom of philosophical thought. Rabbinism and Catholicism were to him but diverse forms of the same inspiration. The Talmud was to the Bible what the scholastic philosophy was to the gospel; and, in his view, Spinoza, like Luther, was one of the liberators of religious thought. There is, indeed, in Spinoza's system much that is intelligible, and much that is salutary to one whose soul is open to the influences of nature; but it is also characterized, as Schmidt well says, by a certain severity of reflection, and a certain dryness of form, while in the hopelessness of its general tone it seems to trample coldly upon all individual life. But, trained by his own experience to enter into the mood and to appreciate the struggles of a thinker like Spinoza, Auerbach felt that there must have been many a sad vicissitude and conflict in the experience of such a mind before it arrived at conclusions apparently so gloomy.

The psychological explication of this problem, in an artistic form, is what Auerbach has aimed at; and, on the whole, it seems to us that he has succeeded very well in attaining his object. Saint-René Taillandier may complain that the separate pictures are but fragments, and Schmidt may think he breaks down when he touches upon the philosophy of Descartes doubtless there are errors in its form, and defects in its substance; Auerbach was but twenty-five years old when he wrote it; and, although he has subsequently revised it carefully twice, it will hardly be expected to withstand very severe criticism. Of course, even in a philosophical romance, there must be something more than philosophy for it is, after all, a work of art; and a work of art demands primarily the individual human element. You cannot portray panthe

ism in a picture, but you can represent in an imaginative form the sufferings and the struggles by which a devout mind works its way out of a narrow creed into a faith that comprehends the universe. You can depict the character of a man so mastered by his intellectual conscience as to turn away from all the prizes that the world has to offer, in order calmly to fathom the divine word that possesses his soul, and to pronounce it at last pure and majestic as he finds it. Auerbach's task, therefore, was not to unfold Spinoza's system; but to show, with all the clearness that the facts of history and well-grounded conjecture will enable him to attain, what sort of a man Spinoza was,—and this in a vivid, dramatic way, so that the reader should be charmed in spite of himself, and be led to recognize the beauty and grandeur of a life which the ignorance and bigotry of men had so long blackened with calumny that his very name had become but another term for the gloomy despair of atheism.

We have only to regret, that, when the author made the final revision of his romance for the collected edition of his writings, he did not think it worth while to preserve, if not the citations and proofs of the first edition, at least the list— contained in the preface to the second of the of the passages which were taken word for word from Spinoza's works, so that the reader who desired to assure himself of the accuracy of the philosophical statements, as well as to scrutinize the grounds on which many of its biographical conjectures were made, could do so easily. The translation, however, which he afterwards published, of the whole of Spinoza's works, from Latin into German, rendered this perhaps unnecessary to the German reader, who could readily refer also to the sketch of Spinoza's life, which Auerbach had prefixed to his translation; and which, besides being the first philosophical and critical sketch that had been made, possessed the advantage of having been based upon a thorough examination of both the sources of information as to his life, viz., the Christian and the Jewish.

At this moment, therefore, when general attention has been called afresh to Spinoza as one of the illustrious thinkers of the