Page:Dante (Oliphant).djvu/225

 with Italy, while Dante, Tasso, and her great historians remain unknown to us; nor can the upheavings of French Society and the mental characteristics of the nation be comprehended without Voltaire, Molière, Rousseau, and other great names beside. Neither is Germany herself without Goethe and Schiller: nor Spain recognisable deprived of that noble figure of Cervantes, in whom lives the very genius of the nation. This great band it is our design to give such an account of as may bring them within the acquaintance of the English reader, whose zeal may not carry him the length of the often thankless study of translations, and whose readings in a foreign language are not easy enough to be pleasant. We are aware that there are difficulties in our way in this attempt which did not lie in the path of the former Series, since in the section of the world for which we write there are many more readers of French and German than of Greek and Latin; but, on the other hand, there is no educated class supremely devoted to the study of Continental Classics, as is the case in respect to the Ancient; and even the greatest authority in the learned matter of a Greek text might be puzzled by Jean Paul Richter, or lose himself in the mysteries of Dante's 'Paradiso.' The audience to which we aspire is, therefore, at once wider and narrower than that to which the great treasures of Hellenic and Roman literature are unfamiliar; and our effort will be to present the great Italian, the great Frenchman, the famous German, to the reader, so as to make it plain to him what and how they wrote, something of how they lived, and more or less of their position and influence upon the literature of their country.