and calm in thought and faith, an inspiring exemplar of joyous serenity and grand achievement; the conquest is complete; and as, by the side of the lovely Idoine, he assumes his inheritance amidst an admiring people, we see the supernal Titan crowned and enthroned. Moral teaching more timely, vital, searching, sanative than this, it will certainly be hard to find. Let us leave it with Jean Paul's own words. For when Albano had ascended to this victorious height, regretfully remembering the other Titans whom he had known, who had been defeated, he felt devoutly grateful for his own escape. "He thought of the beings who lay sunk in graves around him, hard and barren indeed as rocks, but high as rocks too,- of the beings whom Fate had sacrificed, who would fain have used the milky-way of infinity and the rainbow of fancy as a bow in the hand, without ever being able to draw a string across it. Why, then, did not I, too, go down like those whom I esteemed? Did not in me also that scum of excess boil up and overspread the clearness?" "

6

The functions of an author in literature are a reduced and enlarged reproduction of the moral functions of human nature in life. Jean Paul experienced these in his own person with such breadth and intensity, that it was natural that they should reflect themselves with unwonted vividness in his writings. His literary productions follow along in the years of his life in a parallel series with the epochs of his experience, mirroring his sorrows and struggles, his perceptions and studies, his defeats and victories, his memories and aspirations. From their very nature, therefore, they possess an intense ethical instructiveness. They fall into three chief classes: the Satirical, beginning with "Greenland Lawsuits"; the Humorous, as the Life of Quintus Fixlein"; and the Comic, ending with "Nicholaus Margraf." His largest and most serious works, Hesperus" and “ " and "Titan," as well as many of his small pieces, show these three styles in intermixture and alternation. But the special qualities of his genius always display themselves in their fullest dimensions and their most unhampered vigor in the satirical, humorous, or comic form. What, then, is the essential ethical spirit and aim of these respective modes of expression?

If we analyze the nature of satire, to discover its moral import and function, we shall find it to be, in essence, a contrast between something thought and something seen; a contrast, one side of which kindles reverence, the other side anger. It is a comparison, explicit or implied, made in presence of a conceived right and a perceived wrong; a comparison which quickens admiration for the ideal good, indignation for the actual violation of it. Humor, in like manner, rests on or consists in contrast and comparison; but in spirit and purport it differs from satire. Humor is imagination, moved by tenderness, elevating into our sympathy things in themselves too poor and humble for our regard. It is the adornment of the simple and homely by means of imaginative associations. Love, copiously engendered and set free by grand and charming objects, by divine principles and sentiments, diffuses itself. over and transfuses itself into trifling matters, mean and ludicrous things, naturally situated far beneath its range, and so lifts them into our embrace, and this is humor. It shines upon the sadness spread over human life, and transmutes it into joy; as sunshine sifting through a chill mist turns it into powdery gold. In satire the comparison goes upward from a deformed or haggard and bitter actual to an ideal grandeur and good far above, and the emotional result or deposit is scorn for what is seen lying in grim contradiction below. In humor the comparison goes downward from the embrace of truth and love, carrying with it in its descent the light and perfume of all winsome and beautiful relations, and shedding their ennobling associations and delightful influences over humble and imperfect things spread out far beneath. Humor recommends the ugly and insignificant to our esteem and affection by transfiguring and dignifying them with associated beauty and greatness. In the comic, we see the nature and functions of both satire and humor combined and heightened into caricature. The same latent or expressed series of contrasts between what is and what ought to be the actual and the ideal is carried on, but carried on in burlesque exaggeration impelled by an enjoying sense of the ludicrous; and its final moral intent is to exalt the lowly into sympathy by the association of pleasure, and to sink the ignoble into contempt

by the weight of ridicule. Satire, by showing evil contradicting good, engenders an opposing scorn for it. Humor, by associating the universal with the particular, awakens an elevating sympathy with it. Comic wit unites these two in fantastic exaltation, and, neutralizing, by the attachment of an associative pleasure, the hatred which a low incongruity naturally provokes, is a valuable lubricant for the soreness and weariness of human life.

These offices of a moral teacher and censor Jean Paul fulfils with unequalled sincerity and energy. With bitter and bleeding fidelity he exposes and assails the injustice, harshness, cruel coldness, petty jealousies, so common among the poor and ignorant; and with remorseless truth he reveals and denounces the pitiless pride and luxurious sloth, the unmeaning ceremonial glitter and languishing indifference, the frozen or poisoned hearts and perverted heads, the insipid hypocrisy and glistening polish, to be found in the rich and aristocratic circles of his time. To whatever threatens most to degrade man or to corrupt society he devotes his most stinging ridicule. Thus he has no patience with that vile inversion of religion which makes it a mere guard to keep men from perdition. He says of that vulgar morality which deduces all obligation from self-interest: "I compare this cursed exaltation of souls, merely from low motives, with the English horse-tails, which always point to heaven only because their sinews have been cut." He entirely outgrew that spirit of dissatisfaction and querulousness which likes to tease others because it is itself unhappy. He writes in his private journal: " And you, my brothers, I will love more, I will create for you more joy. I will limit my endeavors to making you cheerful, and turn my powers no longer, as hitherto, to torment you." And from that time he began to infuse into whatever he wrote that loving, sunny humor which, bringing the loftiest and widest into connection with the lowliest and narrowest, is adapted to make every man draw all humanity to his breast. Why not expect to find inexhaustible interest and wonder in the parson of a little hamlet, in his house and grounds an idyl-kingdom and pastoral world? Does not every man move in the centre of the horizon, every breath coalesce with the general atmosphere, every

window open on the universe, and every truth vibrate in the infinite organism of truth?

The soul of Jean Paul is so full of poetic sensibility, fiery and gentle humanity, and natural piety, that whatever he produces comes forth spontaneously saturated with moral and spiritual meaning and beauty. Whatever his pen touches instantly becomes charged with ethical power and clothed with religious symbolism. A stroll in the open air was to him as walking down the aisle of a sublimer church, and he asked himself: "Dost thou enter pure into this vast, guiltless temple? Dost thou bring no venomous passion into this place, where flowers bloom and birds sing? Dost thou bear no hatred where Nature loves? Art thou calm as the stream where Nature reflects herself as in a mirror?" His overflowing sympathy does not allow him to look on anything with indifference, and his sharp sight will not permit him to confound good and evil. He must, therefore, dissect motives and characters, and give them praise or blame according to their deserts. He cannot help stripping and stigmatizing deceit and cruelty, and eulogizing sincerity and love. He sets the hypocritical tyrant in the stocks for a deterring example, as in the following instance. "Froulay seriously regarded himself as moral, disinterested, and gentle, merely because he inexorably insisted on all this in the case of others. He retained the habit, when an open-hearted soul showed him its breaches, of marching in upon it through those breaches, as if he had himself made them. The penitent who knelt before him for forgiveness he would crush still lower, and instead of the key of absolution draw forth the hammer of the law." In his inimitable softness of pity, his angelic sweetness of sympathy with the unhappy innocents of the earth, abused children of affliction, victims of unkindness smitten and bleeding invisibly, he has no rival. He says of a sensitive dying maiden with a harsh father, "She had accustomed herself, before him, to dry away with her eye, so to speak, the tear, before it grew big enough to fall." And at another time he says, "O thou who hast still a mother, thank God for her in the day when thy soul is full of joyful tears, and needs a bosom wherein to shed them!" Such is his feeling of the pa

thetic exposures and evanescence of humanity, that it breathes in almost articulate tones through his pages, "To-morrow thy poor brother dies, then thou, more unhappy, followest after: ah! wilt thou vex and injure him to-day?" This makes him in a rare degree a natural teacher of Christian morality.

Jean Paul is especially famous for his treatment of two ethical topics, Friendship and the Immortality of the Soul. No author whatever has written on friendship with such affecting fervor and fulness, insight and beauty, as he. His works are an inexhaustible treasury of searching thoughts, delicious sentiments, and matchless poetic images on this great subject, which must forever be so close and dear to the heart of man. And it is a fact of great interest, that there is nothing in his writings on this topic, romantic as they are, which he did not himself live with his Otto, Herman, Oerthel, Vogel, Emanuel, Herder, Jacobi.

The doctrine of immortality Jean Paul made the central principle in his system of practical philosophy. All the roots of his being struck into it, all the tendrils and vines of his heart and fancy clung to it and clustered about it. He meditated on it early and late, studied its evidences, explored its relations and implications, and, in addition to numberless detached references and remarks, devoted two distinct treatises to it. In his "Campaner-Thal" and his "Selina," he discusses the mighty question with a learning, an acute sagacity, a cogency of argument, an appreciation of the data, an eloquence of feeling, and a variety of illustration, unequalled by any single author among the endless number who have made elaborate expositions of the subject. He writes: "When, in your last hour, all faculty in the broken spirit shall fade away and die into inanity, — imagination, thought, effort, enjoyment, then at last will the night-flower of Belief alone continue blooming, and refresh you with its perfumes in the last darkness."

One ethical point in the works of Jean Paul - and it occurs in the "Titan," the most deliberate and matured of all his writings has often been called in question. It was earnestly condemned by all his friends, and is generally so condemned by those who read the work now. We refer to the fearful