" Beneath
his unlimited faith in pleasure lie natural shrewdness, an
excellent early education, and certain principles of honesty and
good fellowship, which are all the more clearly defined from his
moral looseness in details which are identified in the
Anglo-Saxon mind with total depravity. In such a man, the
appreciation of the beautiful in nature may be keen, but it will
continually vanish before humour or mere fun; while having no
deep root in life or interests in common with the settled
Anglo-Saxon citizen, he cannot fail to appear at times to the
latter as a near relation to Mephistopheles. But his "mockery"
is as accidental and naif as that of Jewish Young Germany is keen
and deliberate; and the former differs from the latter as the
drollery of Abraham a Santa Clara differs from the brilliant
satire of Heine.
The reader should be fairly warned that these poems abound
in words, phrases, suggestions, and even couplets, borrowed to
such an extent from old ballads and other sources, as to make
acknowledgement in many cases seem affectation.
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