Among other and less significant things, he recog nizes him as a romanticist and the chief foe of Romanticism; a true poet and a born journalist; an historian without method, a philosopher without a real philosophy; a free liver and yet loyal to his wife and reverent of his mother; the most tender of Teutonic poets and the most brutally cynical; a Ger man, yet the bitterest scourge of Germany; an intense admirer of Sterne, a lover of Shakespeare, a com mender of the poets of England, and a hater of the nation and everything English; a cynic who laughed at sentiment, and a sentimentalist in spite of all things — impatient and irritable in health, of heroic endur ance in ills more terrible than ever fell to the lot of a poet.