Franz Grillparzer was born in Vienna on the 15th of January, 1791, and died there on the 21st of January, 1872. Fame came to him at the very beginning of his career, yet his long life, consistently devoted to high ideals, brought him disappointments such as have fallen to the lot of few writers of his intellect and character. Prof. August Sauer has prefaced his standard biography of the poet by a telling characterization of the attitude of the world toward him during his lifetime and since his death:

Born in a land which from time immemorial has cultivated German poetry and song, but which in the march of centuries had become completely estranged from the progress of German thought; reared during a time of political stress, when the foundations of law and morality, of hereditary privileges and acquired rights were crumbling; meeting with many obstacles during the period of his youthful development, yet preserving his own individuality in spite of conflicting influences, the poet appeared before the public, at the age of twenty-six, with a work of rare maturity and power, and became at one bound the literary celebrity of his day, both in his native country and the greater German fatherland. But not for long did the favor of the fickle public remain true to him. The theatres of Germany soon closed their doors to the Austrian, and even in his own country he found it difficult to make his way. Roughly handled by shallow and thoughtless critics; forced to defend his intellectual treasures against a stupidly insolent and tyrannical censorship; enduring the tortures of a melancholy temperament, he shrank from the world more and more, and finally lapsed into complete silence after his profoundest and most characteristic work had met with a bare succès d'estime, and a remarkable creation, revealing the humorous side of his genius, had been hooted down by the public of the very theatre which had witnessed his first triumph. And while, dejected and embittered, he gave himself up to his favorite studies—becoming, in his seclusion, a mere myth to his contemporaries—a theatre director of unusual energy and intelligence succeeded in winning back for the Vienna Burgtheater play after play from the literary legacy of the still living writer. The author witnessed the belated flowering of his fame with indifference, almost with disgust; but the homage paid him by his native city extended beyond its bounds, and the remarkable celebration of his eightieth birthday awakened all Germany from her apathetic attitude of so many years. A year later his funeral gave rise to a demonstration such as no German poet since Klopstock had evoked. The honors paid to his memory in Austria were such as had hitherto been reserved only for the most distinguished and popular of her military heroes, like Radetzky and Hess. The enthusiasm thus engendered affected most deeply the rising generation, and the year of his death marked the resurrection of his works. With a surprise akin to awe Germany beheld a half-forgotten poet rise from the shades of the past, her literary possessions being as it were suddenly enriched by the discovery of a national classic. Since then the personality of the poet has aroused growing interest, and the researches of posterity have disclosed the powers of a poet as gifted as he was unfortunate, whose life is thrown into relief by the background of a singular historical epoch now practically closed forever.

United Germany is beginning to atone for the indifference with which down to 1870 Berlin, and not Berlin alone among the great centres of thought, regarded the intellectual life of Vienna. More than any other of Austria's men of genius, has Grillparzer suffered from the wilful neglect of the literary historians of Germany. During a long period, not only critics of the stamp of Wolfgang Menzel—whose littleness has escaped oblivion only because he dared to attack the great—but writers like Gervinus and Julian Schmidt utterly failed to grasp the significance of the Austrian dramatist. Within recent years, however, there has grown up in Germany a Grillparzer literature inferior in volume and minuteness of critical research only to that which gathers steadily around the names of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Heine. Grillparzer's bitter remark to Beethoven: “Foreign literary men have a prejudice against anything that comes from Austria; in Germany there exists a veritable conspiracy against Austrian writers” fortunately finds no echo in the Germany of to-day. All German-speaking countries joined Austria in celebrating the centenary of Grillparzer's birth, in January, 1891, when fifty-five theatres, from Bukowina to the Baltic Provinces, performed his plays.

International fairmindedness has always been slow in making its way into literature. Certainly no German has as yet written a history of German literature that does full justice to Austrian dramatists—a history such as an enlightened foreigner, like Taine, might have produced. Had the brilliant Frenchman chosen to place before the world a picture of what is best and most enduring in the German drama, we should, in all probability, possess a fairer estimate of the achievements of Grillparzer than has until recent times been obtainable from any German source. Whatever the defects of his method, Taine, who pleaded so eloquently for the hospitable interchange of ideas in the realm of literature, who in his “History of English Literature” welcomed the fact that “the French are beginning to comprehend the gravity of the Puritans,” and who hoped that “perhaps the English will end by comprehending the gayety of Voltaire”—the French critic, in comparing Grillparzer with Goethe, Schiller and the very few other German dramatists with whose genius his may fitly be compared, would have made adequate allowance for those natural, political and social characteristics of the country of his birth that made the Austrian poet what he was. The Germans too long refused in his case to heed Goethe's injunction to go into the poet's land in order to understand the poet:

Wer den Dichter will verstehen
Muss in Dichter's Lande gehen.

In an oft-quoted distich Grillparzer wrote: “If you look at the country around you from the heights of the Kahlenberg you will understand what I have written and what I am,” and but a short time before his death he said: “I am not a German, but an Austrian, of Lower Austria, and above all am I a Viennese.” And indeed it is easy to recognize in him the virtues and defects of the typical Viennese, and to trace in his character and his writings the influence of his surroundings during that eventful period of Austrian history that lies between his birth and his death—a period which includes the wars against revolutionary France, Austria's humiliation by Bonaparte, the deadening régime of Metternich, the liberal spring-tide of 1848, the reactionary gloom of the following years, and the catastrophe of Sadowa, which led in 1867, five years before the poet's death, to the transformation of the Hapsburg monarchy into the constitutional dual empire of to-day.

Grillparzer's life nearly equalled in length that of Goethe, but it was as full of sad unrest as Goethe's was of serene repose. “Grillparzer,” says his French biographer, Prof. Auguste Ehrhard, “never knew that quiet and smiling happiness which the Weimar poet owed to his good fortune, to the advantages of a genius always sure of itself, to the balance and harmony of his varied endowments, and also, as we must remember, to his indifference to the political destinies of his country. The Austrian poet lacked these essentials for the enjoyment of life. He experienced bitter disappointments, which all the splendor of his fame could not efface, and his patriotic heart suffered in every crisis through which his country passed.”

Grillparzer has revealed his inner life in a remarkable autobiography, which he wrote in 1853, to conform with a usage of the Vienna Academy of Sciences requiring its members to furnish a sketch of their lives. Unfortunately, his recollections close with the year 1836. There is, however, much valuable autobiographic material in fragmentary jottings and in diaries of his travels in Italy, in 1819; in Germany, in 1826; in France and England, in 1836, and in Greece, in 1843. His “Recollections of the Year 1848” complete the direct record of his life.

He was the son of a cultured lawyer of high character, but somewhat stern disposition, who reminds us in some of his traits of the old Councillor Goethe. The boy inherited from his father the clearness of intellect which was one of his most striking characteristics. The early education he received was desultory, and tended to the suppression of his romantic and artistic instincts. There was little intimacy between father and son. The mother, impressionable and affectionate as she was, entirely lacked the reposeful charm of “Frau Aja,” who presided over young Goethe's home. She came of a musical family and was herself passionately fond of music. Haydn and Mozart had frequented the house of her father, Christopher Sonnleithner. He and his two sons were well known in the musical and theatrical circles of Vienna. Franz inherited his mother's musical talent, which afterward proved his chief solace, but, unfortunately, along with it, the tendency to melancholy which brooded over his whole life.

He was the oldest of four sons. He differed from his brothers so radically in character and tastes that he grew up, as he wrote, “in complete isolation.” All his brothers proved a source of constant care to him. One of them drowned himself at the age of seventeen, another became insane. The brothers passed the years of their childhood in a gloomy dwelling with enormous rooms, into which a ray of sunshine rarely penetrated.

Franz was an omnivorous reader from a very early age. A story of the martyrdom of the saints, which fell into his hands at a country place, awakened in him the desire to become a priest and rival their heroism in suffering. “When I returned to town,” he relates, “I got myself a priestly robe made of yellow paper, and read mass, my oldest brother gladly acting as my assistant. I preached leaning over the back of a chair, our old cook, who listened very devoutly to my nonsense, being my only audience. She was also the only listener I had when I played on the piano, but she cared for one piece only, which she asked me to play again and again. At that time the execution of Louis XVI. was still fresh in everybody's mind. Among other exercises I played a march, which I was told had been performed at the execution, and in the second part of which there was a run of an octave, played with one finger, that was supposed to express the drop of the guillotine's knife. The old woman always wept copiously when I reached that passage, and could not hear it often enough.”

The children received scarcely any religious instruction. “My father,” he wrote, “had been reared in the period of Joseph II. and did not think much of religious exercises. My mother attended mass every Sunday; she was followed by a man-servant, who carried her prayer book; but we children never entered church. I remember that later on, at the gymnasium, where every schoolday began with mass, I, in my savage ignorance, had to watch my comrades in order to know when to rise, to kneel, or to beat the breast.”

Young Grillparzer shared Goethe's early and intense interest in the theatre. He and his brothers acted in romantic plays improvised by him, and manufactured their own knightly armor and the stage settings. He was inspired by a dramatic library which he found among his father's books, and which included “Hamlet” and “King Lear,” but none of the plays of Schiller and Goethe. Lessing's “Nathan der Weise” he did not find to his liking. Among other books which fascinated him were translations of Cook's “Voyages,” Buffon's “Natural History” and, above all, Guthrie and Gray's “Universal History,” which he “devoured rather than read.” The first German poets he became acquainted with were Gessner and Ewald Kleist. When at last a volume of Goethe fell into his hands, he was charmed with the hero of “Götz von Berlichingen,” but did not much care for the other characters. Nor did he fully appreciate Schiller's plays. He read “Wallenstein's Lager” eagerly, but the “Piccolomini” he found dull, because of the long speeches. He preferred a translation of Gozzi's “Raven” to all the dramas of Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare. The boy became early aware that he was hampered in his dramatic recitations by a lisp, an inherited defect which he later overcame by imitating the example of Demosthenes.

Neither at the gymnasium nor at the university was Grillparzer remarkable for scholarship or application, but he soon became known among his fellow-students and to some of his professors for his literary gifts. His father discouraged the youthful author, although he took a certain pride in his talent. He generally wound up his criticism of his son's productions by predicting that he would die a pauper's death. “My father's displeasure,” wrote Grillparzer, “reached its height at the time of the first occupation of Vienna by the French, after our disastrous campaign. My patriotic ardor, stimulated by my father's own attitude, prompted me to ridicule the absurd measures of the government in a wretched song. When I read it to him he turned pale with fright, represented to me that I ran the risk of imperilling my future by such verses, and implored me not to show them to any one, though he did not tell me to destroy them, which fact, as I thought, proved that he was not altogether displeased with them.” In some unexplained way the poem had already fallen into strange hands, for the next day his father returned in dismay from the restaurant where he occasionally took a glass of beer in the evening, and told the boy that the poem had been read aloud by one of the guests and met with general approval. “The doggerel,” wrote Grillparzer, “went the rounds of the city, in spite or rather because of its uncouth plainness of speech, but fortunately no one guessed the name of the author.” The verses, entitled “Schlecht und Recht” (“Wrong and Right”), are included in Grillparzer's collected poems, and testify alike to his fervent patriotism and a skill in versification remarkable in a boy of fourteen.

Under the influence of Schiller's “Don Carlos,” Grillparzer began, at the age of sixteen, a drama, Blanka von Kastilien, which he finished two years later. It deals with the fate of the queen of Pedro the Cruel, and is chiefly interesting as foreshadowing certain psychological problems which he introduced in later dramas. Blanka resembles “Don Carlos” in being far too long to be performed in one evening. Though not without dramatic promise, it is crude and prosy. Grillparzer's early power of self-analysis is shown in his own condemnation of the play, in 1808, as one that could never be acted. His mind was occupied with half-a-dozen ambitious dramatic schemes, but he finished only, in 1811, a little comedy, Wer ist schuldig? (“Who is Guilty?”), which reminds one of Körner's one-act plays.

Grillparzer, like Goethe, studied law to please his father, but like him, also, he derived the principal inspiration of his college years from contact with gifted fellow-students. Kant's philosophy was the subject of heated discussion at social gatherings in their rooms. One of his closest friends, Altmütter, who afterwards became professor of chemistry in the Vienna Institute of Technology, anticipated, according to Grillparzer, Sir Humphry Davy in a discovery concerning the nature of alkalies. “Altmütter and I,” wrote Grillparzer in his autobiography, “were among the very laziest students, and really cared only for discussions. We loved to stroll among the beautiful surroundings of Vienna, indulging in the most extravagant plans for the future. Thus we stood one day upon the heights of the Kahlenberg, behind us the pedestal of some lost statue. We mounted the altar-like block with a feeling of almost godlike importance, and, embracing each other, looked out upon the vast panorama spread before us. Unnoticed by us, an elderly gentleman, evidently a North German, had climbed the height, and standing near us, regarded us with astonishment. ‘Yes,’ said Altmütter to him, as we descended, ‘do not wonder. This one—pointing to me—will raise a temple, and I shall tear one down.’ As for the latter, he meant Lavoisier's system of chemistry. The gentleman probably thought he had two lunatics before him.”

At the age of fifteen Grillparzer experienced the first pangs of love. The object of his devotion was an actress at one of the minor theatres, of the same age as himself. He had an exalted idea of both her person and her accomplishments, and when he learned that her character was not above reproach, and saw her at the theatre in a box, in the company of an old man, he was so greatly shocked that he became ill. He saw and heard around him at an early day much that was objectionable, but “an innate sense of shame,” he wrote, “preserved me from following the bad example given me by my comrades. This—shall I call it sense of honor?—was so strong in me that it did not even permit me to cut my lessons at school. To the best of my knowledge, I have never missed a lecture.” Another youthful love episode is worth recording.

“Several years afterwards,” he relates, “I fell in love with a singer, who, as Cherubin in Mozart's ‘Figaro,’ in all the charm of her youthful beauty, and transfigured by the glorious music, took complete possession of my imagination. I wrote a poem to her which may be called good, although its passionate fervor bordered somewhat on the insane, or even on the immoral. However, it never entered my mind to approach her in person. I was at that time in the poorest circumstances, as was evidenced by my wardrobe, while the object of my passion was decked in silk and gold, the daily gifts of her numerous admirers. Nor could I assume that the charms of my person might predispose her in my favor. I therefore locked up my verses with a keen feeling of my humbleness, and nothing in the world could have tempted me to speak of my sentiments to any one. Long after, I met a young and wealthy man, who had been during the period of my Cherubin frenzy one of the favored admirers of my heroine, that is to say, one of those who paid her tribute in solid coin. We talked of poetry, and he remarked how queer it was that poets whose first productions manifested decided talent so often disappeared from public view forever. Thus he remembered to have seen—he did not know in what way—at the time of his acquaintanceship with that singer, a poem professing the most ardent love for her in the most beautiful verses. The girl became almost frantic on reading them, and used every effort to find out who the author was, declaring that if she succeeded she would dismiss all her admirers, in order to grant to the unknown poet the favor he craved in such beautiful language. This declaration, he said, almost caused a rupture between them. At the present day, he went on to say, there was not a poet before the public able to write such verses. I asked him to show me the poem, and sure enough it was my own. In a manner unaccountable to me it had found its way to her, and while I was consumed with hopeless longing, the beautiful object of my desires awaited with impatience an opportunity of meeting me. But such has been my fate throughout life—want of confidence in myself whenever I was undecided how to act, alternating with haughty pride whenever I was disparaged or compared with some one else to my disadvantage.” The poem, under the title “Cherubin,” has a place in the collected works, and is indeed remarkable for its glowing passion, unreservedly, though not indelicately, expressed.

The growing ill-health of his father awoke the young student from his life of careless ease. In his melancholy mood he took up once more the study of music, which he had neglected for years. But he had forgotten all he ever knew, and nothing remained but the ability to improvise. “Often,” he wrote, “I placed a copper engraving upon the music stand before me and played what the subject suggested, as though it were a musical composition. I remember that later on, while I was a tutor in the house of a noble family, the violin teacher of the young count, a musician of high standing, listened to me behind the door for a quarter of an hour at a time, and on entering the room could not praise me enough. The count's possessions included only an old piano without strings; nevertheless, I often played upon it for half a day, without intermission, and regardless of the absence of sound. Later on, when I devoted myself to poetry, the gift of musical improvisation gradually diminished, particularly after I took lessons in counterpoint, in order to systematize my thoughts. My progress and development become more satisfactory, but I lost inspiration, and now I know but little more than when my fondness for music first awoke. I had always this strange peculiarity, that in passing from one subject to another, I lost my fondness for the former, and with it whatever ability for it I possessed, and what skill in it I had acquired. I have cultivated whatever a man can do. Dancing, hunting, riding, fencing, drawing, swimming—there was nothing too difficult for me. Yes, I may say that, with the exception of hunting, I cultivated everything with decided talent, and yet I have been weaned from all these things. Thus I was one of the best, or at least one of the most elegant, of swimmers, but if I were thrown into the water to-day, I should certainly drown. Inspiration has been my deity, and thus it will always be.”

During his father's illness he set to music a number of songs, among them Goethe's “König von Thule,” which the sufferer never tired of hearing. The father's decline was rapid. His illness was the result of his patriotic sorrow over the political misfortunes of Austria, which the son also keenly felt. The young man enrolled himself in the student corps which in 1809 was organized to defend the city against the French invaders. Grillparzer's father was financially ruined by the social disorganization following the military disasters, and the national downfall broke his heart. After he read the provisions of the humiliating peace of Pressburg, he was a changed man. “When, impelled by a presentiment of his approaching end, I sank on my knees at his bedside and, weeping, kissed his hand, he said: ‘It is now too late,’ doubtless wishing to convey to me that he was not fully satisfied with my character and my doings.” “I never really loved my father,” adds Grillparzer, “he was too forbidding in manner. Just as he most rigidly suppressed his own emotions, so he made it almost impossible for any one to approach him with any display of sentiment. Only later on, when I learned to appreciate the motives of some of his actions, and when I rejoiced in the reputation—which lives on to this day—of his almost incredible honesty, and was thereby inspired to emulate, however feebly, his own example, only then did I pay to his memory the debt incurred during his life-time.”

The death of the father left the family almost absolutely without means. Two of the sons earned a living by giving music lessons, and Franz, who was then in his eighteenth year, and had still two years of law study before him, acted as tutor to two young noblemen, and was thus enabled to contribute to the support of his mother. He bethought himself of his tragedy Blanka von Kastilien, and offered it to the secretary of the Burgtheater, Herr Sonnleithner, his mother's brother. The play was returned to him with the curt remark that it was unfit for performance, and the young author, remembering his father's prophecy, resolved to renounce forever all dreams of a literary career. Meantime, he had lost his pupils, but one of his former professors offered him a position as tutor in jurisprudence to the nephew of a wealthy count. The young man had another teacher for his general studies, and Grillparzer was only required to give him a few hours of special instruction daily.

I got into a queer family,” he writes in his autobiography. “The young count, of about my own age, who is still living, will not think ill of me if I say in this place that our studies, probably as much through my fault as through his own, amounted to very little. The old uncle was a veritable caricature, frightfully ignorant and arrogant, self-willed, stingy, and bigoted. Having formerly been ambassador at one of the more important German courts and imperial commissary at Ratisbon, he loved to talk of his missions. I have called him stingy, but he was not so in regard to two matters—his stable and the kitchen. In the former he kept a number of magnificent steeds, which, from excessive care for them, he hardly ever used. Over the kitchen presided alternately two cooks of the first quality, a German and a Frenchman. I won the count's favor through my appetite, then highly developed. Every day, between eleven and twelve o'clock, he entered my room in his soiled dressing-gown, in order to read to me the menu and to lay out a sort of plan of campaign—how much was to be eaten of one dish and how little of another, in order to leave room for the next and more tempting course. I was on the road to becoming an epicure in this house, although finally only too glad to return to my mother's simple fare. In spite of all the favor I gained in this way, I was considered by the count a Jacobin, which title he applied to anybody who had opinions different from his own. His wife—we called her the princess because she came of a princely family—passed her time in devotional exercises, and drove to church every day as many times as her husband permitted her to hitch up, in due rotation, the splendid show horses.

Grillparzer enjoyed, on the whole, his leisurely employment. He made abundant use of the library, particularly rich in English books, which the count's grandfather had brought from London, where he had been ambassador. No one else in the house ever looked at a book, and the only difficulty in using the library to his heart's content lay in turning the rusty key of the library room. Grillparzer's first care was to perfect his knowledge of English, which he had some time before begun to study by himself, in order to be able to read Shakespeare in the original. In the summer he went with the family to their estates in Moravia. The other tutor having been dismissed, he had to take entire charge of his pupil. He accompanied him daily to church and took along with him the “Vicar of Wakefield,” which the family, from the name of “Vicar” on the title-page, supposed to be a devotional book of some sort. In the winter he returned with the young count to the city and continued as his tutor, although he had found, in February, 1813, an unsalaried position in the imperial library of Vienna. During the following summer months, when the library was closed, Grillparzer again joined his pupil at a castle of the family in Moravia. Nearby there was a famous shrine, Maria Stip, much frequented by pious pilgrims. He was compelled to accompany the countess on one of her visits to the church, and caught a chill there. The count's surgeon, suspecting a contagious disease, advised that the patient be isolated, and had him sent to a lonely hut near Maria Stip, where the village barber used to cup those of the pilgrims who required his attention. For a time the surgeon came to see Grillparzer, but soon his visits ceased, and he was left in charge of the village barber. His illness grew desperate and he himself believed that his end was near. When he finally recovered and was able to journey home he heard of the battle of Leipsic. The noble family had fled from the estate. His money was gone; he had seen during his illness a woman open the drawer in which it lay, but thought he was dreaming. He borrowed, however, enough for the trip, which was retarded by the confusion into which the country had been thrown. “No postmaster, no postilion, no innkeeper or waiter was to be found. Everybody was in the streets. The newspapers were read aloud publicly, people embraced, rejoiced, wept, the millennium seemed to have arrived.”

On his return to Vienna he made the impression of one returned from the dead. When he called on the family of his pupil he discovered “not a trace of shame or repentance on their aristocratic faces, although there was a certain embarrassment in their manner.” They had engaged a tutor for the young count, but were willing to have Grillparzer continue his special instruction. He resumed his task, devoting himself at the same time heart and soul to the study of languages in the imperial library, where his official duties were of the lightest. The condition of things there was characteristic of the easy-going ways of Viennese officialdom.

The employees, mostly good-natured persons, conducted themselves pretty much as might old invalid soldiers in an armory; they preserved what they found on hand, showed rare things to visitors, used the slim appropriations for the purchase of all imaginable editions of the classics and kept away, as far as possible, all forbidden, that is to say, all modern, books. Systematic library work was out of the question. All this suited me perfectly. My first care was to add to my knowledge of Greek, which I and my colleague Eichenfeld studied diligently. In order to be undisturbed, we went into the manuscript room of the library, and there, surrounded by all the necessary material, we read the Greek writers. This lasted for some time, until the first custodian of the institution, an intolerable ignoramus, himself without the ability or desire to use a manuscript, got wind of our doings and, impelled by envy at the thought of our possibly editing a manuscript—a thing he could not dream of doing—forbade us from entering the manuscript room.

I had in the meantime also devoted myself to another language, the study of which I had begun some time previously, and which was to have the most important influence on my future career. I had always had a conviction that a poet could not be translated into another language. In spite of my bad memory, I had therefore acquired, in addition to the two ancient languages and the indispensable French, a knowledge of Italian and English; and at a very early age, attracted by Bertuch's translation of Don Quixote and his remarks about Spanish poets, I had begun the study of Spanish. I had stumbled upon a very ancient Spanish grammar, so ancient as to antedate Lope de Vega and Calderon and to compel me later on to unlearn and modify the rules thus acquired. Owing to lack of money, I was without a dictionary until I picked up at a second-hand bookshop a volume of Sobrino, which it is true was minus the entire letter A, but which on that account was offered for one florin in paper money. This was scarcely a sufficient equipment for the serious study of the language. About that time there appeared Schlegel's translation of some of the plays of Calderon, among which his ‘Devotion at the Cross’ chiefly attracted me. However admirable I considered Schlegel's translation of Shakespeare, that of Calderon's plays appeared to me entirely inadequate. That a writer who in his imaginative flights soared almost beyond the reach of poesy could not have indulged in such stiff and awkward phrases, was perfectly clear to me. Armed with all the resources of the imperial library, I threw myself with ardor into the study of Spanish, and attacked it where the difficulties were greatest, that is to say, in the plays of Calderon. In order not to pass lightly over obstacles, and to force myself to look up every new word in the dictionary, I resolved to translate the play I had chosen, ‘La vida es sueño,’ rendering it, passage for passage, at once into German verse and even, following the original, into rhyme. How much time I consumed in this tedious labor I do not know; at all events I did not get beyond half of the first act; but that sufficed, as the only object of my translation was the study of the language.

It so happened that this very play of Calderon's was then about to be performed in Vienna, and when Grillparzer mentioned to a friend that he had himself tried his hand at translating it, he was induced by him to lend him the manuscript, and, finally, to allow the Modenzeitung, an influential literary journal, to print it. Grillparzer's translation appeared the day after the first performance of Calderon's play, and was lauded to the skies by the editor of the Modenzeitung, to the disparagement of the other translation. The author of the latter was “Karl August West,” the pseudonym of Joseph Schreyvogel, the able secretary and artistic manager of the imperial theatre at Vienna. Schreyvogel, who knew Grillparzer's family, but had never met Franz, was deeply chagrined at the thought that the young man should lend himself to a malicious personal attack on him. When he learned that the translator was entirely guiltless of any such purpose, he expressed a desire to make his acquaintance, and from their first meeting dated the beginning of the close relations between Grillparzer and Schreyvogel which ended only with the death of the latter.