Everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, all long winded and wearying species of style, are developed in profuse variety among Germans pardon me for stating the fact that even Goethe's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, as a reflection of the good old time to which it belongs, and as an expression of German taste at a time when there was still a German taste, which was a rococo taste in moribus et artibus.