The impressions which our author gives of Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, George Sand, Balzac and Mérimée are vivid and concrete; they are high achievements in literary portraiture, set in a real historic background.
The personality, writings, and actions of Byron had an extraordinary influence upon "Young Germany," a movement initiated by Heine and Börne, and characterised by a strong craving for liberty. "Byron, with his contempt for the real negation of liberty that lay concealed beneath the 'wars of liberty' against Napoleon, with his championship of the oppressed, his revolt against social custom, his sensuality and spleen, his passionate love of liberty in every domain, seemed to the men of that day to be an embodiment of all that they understood by the modern spirit, modern poetry."
The literary group known as Young Germany has no creative minds of the highest, and only one of very high rank, namely, Heine. "It denied, it emancipated, it cleared up, it let in fresh air. It is strong through its doubt, its hatred of thraldom, its individualism." The Germany of those days has been succeeded by a quite new Germany, organised to build up and to put forth material strength, and the writers of the first half of the nineteenth century, who were always praising France and condemning the sluggishness of their own country, are but little read.
The literary figures of this period who are painted by our author, are Börne, Heine, Immermann, Menzel, Gutzkow, Laube, Mundt, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, Bettina von Arnim, Charlotte Stieglitz, and many others, to whose writings, in conjunction with those of the French Romanticists, Brandes ascribes the general revolt of the oppressed peoples of Europe in 1848. Of the men of that date he says: "They had a faith that could remove mountains, and a hope that could shake the earth. Liberty, parliament, national unity, liberty of the Press, republic, were to them magic words, at the very sound of which their hearts leaped like the heart of a youth who suddenly sees his beloved."
Robert Burton was born on February 8, 1576, of an old family, at Lindley, Leicestershire, England; was educated at the free school of Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, and at Brasenose College, Oxford, and in 1599 was elected student of Christ Church. In 1616 he was presented with the vicarage of St. Thomas, Oxford, and in 1636 with the rectory of Segrave, in Leicestershire, and kept both these livings until his death. But he lived chiefly in his rooms at Christ Church, Oxford, where, burrowing in the treasures of the Bodleian Library, he elaborated his learned and whimsical book. He died on January 25, 1639, and was buried in Christ Church Cathedral. The "Anatomy of Melancholy" is an enormous compendium of sound sense, sly humour, universal erudition, mediæval science, fantastic conceits, and noble sentiments, arranged in the form of a most methodical treatise, divided, and subdivided again, into sections dealing with every conceivable aspect of this fell disorder. It is an intricate tissue of quotations and allusions, and its interest lies as much in its texture as in its argument. The "Anatomy" consists of an introduction, "Democritus Junior to the Reader," and then of three "Partitions," of which the first treats of the Causes of Melancholy, the second of its Cure, and the third of Love-Melancholy, wherewith is included the Melancholy of Superstition.