His
own diction became more and more tinctured with Germanisms. There was
something Gothic in his taste, which was attracted by the lawless, the
grotesque, and the whimsical in the writings of Jean Paul Richter. His
favorite among English humorists was Sterne, who has a share of these
same qualities. He spoke disparagingly of "the sensuous literature of
the Greeks," and preferred the Norse to the Hellenic mythology. Even in
his admirable critical essays on Burns, on Richter, on Scott, Diderot,
and Voltaire, which are free from his later mannerism--written in
English, and not in Carlylese--his sense of spirit is always more lively
than his sense of form. He finally became so impatient of art as to
maintain--half-seriously--the paradox that Shakspere would have done
better to write in prose. In three of these early essays--on the _Signs
of the Times_, 1829; on _History_, 1830, and on _Characteristics_,
1831--are to be found the germs of all his later writings. The first of
these was an arraignment of the mechanical spirit of the age. In every
province of thought he discovered too great a reliance upon systems,
institutions, machinery, instead of upon men. Thus, in religion, we have
Bible societies, "machines for converting the heathen.
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