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152 business, and, in order to judge Wagner, he thought it was sufficient to attend a single representation of Siegfried, at which he arrived after the rise of the curtain, while he left in the middle of the second act. In the matter of literature he is, it goes without saying, rather better informed. But by what curious aberration did he evade the criticism of the Russian writers whom he knew so well, while he laid down the law to foreign poets, whose temperament was as far as possible removed from his own, and whose leaves he merely turned with contemptuous negligence!

His intrepid assurance increased with age. It finally impelled him to write a book for the purpose of proving that Shakespeare “was not an artist.”

“He may have been—no matter what: but he was not an artist.”