Introduction.

If a contemporary of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had asked himself the question:„In what relation does the literature of that people which has given to Mankind the most important inventions and which can boast of a Luther and a Leibnitz, stand to that of the other European nations, how has the same influenced the civilisation of adjacent countries, and in what branches of mental activity— in art, poetry, philosophy or criticism— are our countrymen looked up to as patterns to be imitated?“— What would the answer have probably been?

Ever since the times of the Thirty Vears' War with its nameless misery, and the mental and material barrenness, which were its melancholy and lasting consequences in all parts of the unhappy country, the German nation had lost the power of influencing its neighbours; and the same people which, in the days of Martin Luther had, so to speak, set the Western World on fire, now lay for a long time in a state of torpor, quietly submitting to be trodden upon and unable to give any sign of vitality. The historical causes of this sad degeneracy are universally known. 3

For more than a century Europe seemed utterly to ignore all manifestations of the German mind, or, if it ever happened that a German production came into notice, it was but to treat it with contempt or ridicule. The scholars themselves disdained to make use of the vernacular language preferring to write in French or barbarons Latin. For the former had, since the time of Louis XIV. become the undisputed mistress of all Europe, and French taste, French manners and conventional stiffness had followed in its train and infected not only society in general, but also the republic of letters. And although not one of the literatures of Europe was able to escape the spread of this influence, nowhere were the consequences so disastrous and so lasting as in Germany. For, whereas, for instance, in England this conventional artificiality came and disappeared again with the wretched dynasty of the Stuarts, in Germany deep movements and dreadful revolutions preceded the throwing off of the unnatural foreign yoke.

Soon, however, after the middle of the eighteenth century a new era commences, and a gradual change takes place. Then eminent philosophers, poets and historians arise, who make it their task to awaken the dormant national spirit from its degrading lethargy and who, reviving the study of the long-neglected German antiquity, holding up as models the magnificent productions of the Britons

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