Excerpt from Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. 3 of 7: Collected and Republished (First Time, 1839; Final, 1869) That no such apotheosis was appointed for Richter in his own country, or is now to be anticipated in any other, we can not but regard as a natural and nowise unfortunate circumstance. What divinity lies in him requires a calmer worship, and from quite another class of worshippers. Neither, in spite of that forty-years abeyance, shall we accuse England of any uncom mon blindness towards him: nay, taking all things into account, we should rather consider his actual footing among us as evinc ing not only an increased rapidity in literary intercourse, but an intrinsic improvement in the manner and objects of it. Our feeling of foreign excellence, we hope, must be becoming truer our Insular taste must be opening more and more into a Eu ropean one. For Richter is by no means a man whose merits, like his singularities, force themselves on the general eye; in deed, without great patience, and some considerable catholicism of disposition, no reader is likely to prosper much with him. He has a fine, high, altogether unusual talent; and a manner of expressing it perhaps still more unusual. He is a Humorist heartily and throughout; not only in low provinces of thought, where this is more common, but in the loftiest provinces, where it is well-nigh unexampled; and thus, in wild sport, 'playing bowls with the sun and moon, ' he fashions the strangest ideal world, which at first glance looks no better than a chaos. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.