A SHORT HISTORY OF GERMAN LITERATURE BY JAMES K. HOSMER PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND GERMAN LITERATURE IN "So viel Einzelnes ist in den Vordergrund gestellt worden, dass der klare Ueber REVISED EDITION NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1904 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. If we turn back two hundred years, we find the reading men of England, if they have time to go beyond their own authors, giving their attention, among moderns, to the Italians and Spanish. As yet in Europe only Italy and Spain, besides England, had seen the rise of literatures of sufficient moment to influence the cultivated world beyond the national limits. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, Machiavelli had lived, and these are still the greatest Italian names. In Spain, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon had done their work, work which no succeeding writers of that land have equalled. If we go back one hundred years, the literature of France has taken the place in the estimation of the English once held by the writers of Spain and Italy; the brilliant men of the age of Louis XIV have laid the world under their spell. In our time, again, the influence of France has been, to a large extent, supplanted. Following especially the lead of two of the most gifted Englishmen of the century, Coleridge and Carlyle, the present generation turns with most reverence to the Germans, often regarding their literature as the most important in the world, after our own, if, indeed, we are to make that exception. It will scarcely be questioned that some knowledge of the history of German literature is, to English-speaking persons, an essential part of thorough culture. In the account of the adventures of the god Thor |