Of all German romanticists few have been so widely read and none so extensively imitated as E. Th. A. Hoffmann. He was in France the most popular of all foreign novelists, and exerted a strong and lasting influence upon French writers of the nineteenth century. His popularity and influence in his fatherland has been by no means so steady as in France. To be sure, at the time of his death in 1822, his books were the best sellers in Germany. But he soon lost favor with German readers, partly because the majority of literary men were hostile to him. Still worse did he fare in England, where he became known much earlier than in France, but never succeeded in gaining the favor of critics or public.