Obituary: Veit Valentin 1842-1900Author(s): Hugo K. SchillingSource: Modern Language Notes, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Feb., 1901), p. 64Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2917239 .

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127 February, igor. AfODERN LANGUAGE NOTES. Vol. xvi, No. 2. 128

these pages is taken up by notes, the edition is still muich longer than the sixty-four pages of original text can possibly justify.

The value of the find under notice will ap- pear all the more important if we recall the fact that this fifth book was referred to, where opinions of Rabelais were quoted, compara- tively more frequently than any other part of Gargantua et Pantagrutel. Here are to be found the famous descriptions of l'Isle son- nante, of the Arckidiec1zE des Chats fourres, of the Pzys des Lanternois, of the Oracle de la dive bouteille, etc.

The following is the exact title of the 1549 edition:

Le cinquiesme livre

des faicts et dictz du noble Pan

tagruel; Auquelz sont comprins,

les grans Abus, & d'esordon6e Vie de, Plusieurs Es-

tatz, de ce m6 de.

Composez par M. Francoys Rabelays Docteur, en Medeci

ne & Abstracteur de quite Essen ce

Imprime en Lan Alil cinc cens Quarante neuf.

ALBERT SCHINZ. Bryn-Mawr College.

OBITUARY. VEIT VALENTIN.

ON the twentieth of December, I900, Professor Veit Valentin, the President of the Akade- mnische Gesanzt-Ausschuss of theFreieDeutsche Hockistifl at Frankfurt am Main, and a mem- ber of the executive council of the Goethe- Gesellschaft, was stricken down by acute congestion of the brain, which led to his death on the twenty-fourth, in the fifty-eighth year of his age. He had been suffering with severe headaches for more than a year, and a trip to Vienna, where he attended the unveiling of the Goethe monument, brought on the fatal crisis.

He was a native of Frankfurt and came of highly gifted stock. His uncle, the poet and critic Georg Friedrich Daumer, early aroused in him an ardent love of poetry and that keen appreciation of asthetic formii which became

the salient characteristic of his writings. As a student of theology and philosophy at Got- tingen, he showed his devotion to scientific ideals, uninfluenced by the thought of a Brotstudirnm, by occupying himself chiefly with the Semitic languages and the related Coptic; the fruit of hiis work in this field was a treatise on Die Bildieng des kofitischen No- mnens, i866. Going thence to Berlin, he be- came a pupil of Eduard Gerlhard, and devoted himself to the study of archaeology and the fine arts generally, for which lie was by nature peculiarly fitted, and in which he soon dis- played exceptional ability. During the next two decades, as Oberlehrer in what is now the municipal Realgymnsasiurm of Frankfiirt, he found leisure to write a number of critical and aesthetic essays, among which his contri- bution to Dohme's Kunst tcend Kiinstler on the German painters of the first half of the nine- teenth century (Cornelius, Overbeck, VTeit, Schnorr, Fiihrich) is perhaps the most widely known; they showed an untusual breadth of scholarship, a philosophical turn of miind, and marked originality of conception and treat- ment. From the time when he became con- nected with the Hochstift, lie confined himself almost entirely to the study of Goethe; be- sides numerous articles, he published, in I894, a volume on Goethe's Faucstdichtuncg in ilkrer kiinstlerischen Eijheit dargestellt. The new theory concerning Honiunculus and Helena which he advanced in this book, excited par- ticular attention; lie supported it further by an elaborate and ingeniouis argument in the Goethe-Jahrbuch, Vol. xvi, aiid defeiided it in two articles in the MOD. LANG. NOTES, Vol. xiii, Nos. 7 and 8, and Vol. xv, Nos. 7 anid 8. The second of these two was the last article from his pen published during hiis life- time. A comprehensive treatise on Die K7as- sische Walfurgisnacht in Goethie's Faucst was ready for the printer at the time of his death, and will appear in the near future; a book on asthetics, on whicn he had been working for a number of years, remains unfinislhed. In pedagogical circles he will be remembered as the editor of a series of school texts with ex- cellent introdtuctions; the Goetlteforschuzng loses by his untimely death an ardent admirer and an enthusiastic studeint and expounder of his great fellow-townsman.

HUGO K. SCHILLING.

64

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