We should, however, form a very inadequate estimate of the services this great writer has rendered to literature, and of the influence he has exerted on his age, were we to confine our attention solely to his larger works. Throughout his whole life, he was an assiduous contributor to periodical literature--a species of writing which, in the present age, has been cultivated with signal success in England, France and Germany. At the commencement of the present century, he edited in conjunction with Tieck, Novalis and his brother, a literary journal, entitled the Athenæum; and afterwards successively conducted political and philosophical journals, such as the "Europa,"--the "German Museum,"--and lastly the "Concordia;" giving latterly, also, his zealous support to the Vienna Quarterly Review. Some of his earlier critiques have already been noticed. Among the shorter literary essays, which appeared in the twelve years that elapsed from 1800 to 1812, I may notice the one entitled "the Epochs of Literature," 1800; and which may be considered the first rude outline of those immortal lectures on the "History of Literature," which he delivered in 1812. Often as he has occasion to treat the same subject, yet such is the inexhaustible wealth of his intellect, he seldom tires by repetition. Thus his minutest fragments, like the sketches of Raphael, are full of interest and variety. Another essay of the same year, "on the different style in Goethe's earlier and later works," shews with what a discriminating eye the young critic had already scanned all the heights and the depths of this wonderful poet. Of this great writer, the moral direction of some of whose writings he reprobated in the strongest degree, he did not hesitate to say that, like Dante in the middle age, he was the founder of a new order of poetry--that he had been the first to restore the art to the elevation from which, since the commencement of the seventeenth century, it had sunk--that he united the amenity of Homer--the ideal beauty of Sophocles--and the wit of Aristophanes. The opinion which in youth he had formed of the great national poet of Germany, his maturer experience fully confirmed. Eight years afterwards he published a long and elaborate critique on Goethe's lays, songs, elegies, and miscellaneous poems. Pre-eminently great as Goethe is in every branch of poetry, in songs he is allowed to stand perfectly unrivalled. "From the shores of the Baltic to the frontiers of Alsace," says the Baron d'Eckstein, "the lyric poetry of Goethe lives in the hearts and on the lips of an enthusiastic people." In this reviewal we find, among other things, a learned and ingenious dissertation on the various species of lyric poetry--the lay, the romance, the ballad, and the occasional poem; on the nature, object, and limits of each--their points of resemblance, and points of difference, together with observations on the fitness of certain metres for certain kinds of poetry.