national self-respect. This came with the world-amaz-
ing victories of the great King of Prussia.

But while the interval between the Peace of West-
phalia and the Second Silesian War is in the main an
unrefreshing period of artificiality and imitation, the
desert is not without its oases. In the first place there
is Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, which is thoroughly
German and essentially original. It is the work of a
virile realist who had lived much and was interested in
life for its own sake; and while not free from the dis-
cursive pedantry in which the age delighted, it is, at any
rate, readable--the most readable prose of the century.
It is by no means to be inferred that Grimmelshausen
was unaffected by literary tradition; on the contrary, he
read omnivorously, and drew hints from many literary
sources.

Down to about the middle of the seventeenth century
the German reader of fiction had fed mainly on imported
products and weak imitations of them. There were three
types, each with its variations. In the first place there
was the romance of heroic gallantry, which had derived
from Amadis de Gaul, and taken on a deeper tinge of
sentimentalism under the influence of the pastorals.
Then there was the political romance, to which an im-
pulse was given in Germany by Opitz through his trans-
lation of Barclay's Argenis. To this type belonged the
patriotic but stilted and interminable Arminius of Lohen. stein
, admired of many for its colossal erudition. And
then there was the picturesque novel, or romance of
roguery, from Spain. The type made its appearance on
German soil in 1615 in an adaptation from the Spanish
by the Munich scholar Albertinus. It bore the title:
"Der Landst örzer (Vagabond), called Gusman von Alfa-

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