But Opitz (of whom if any critic speaks disrespectfully, I fear that it argues him uncritical) wrote not merely on the eve, but in the actual stormy morning, of the Thirty Years’ War: and Germany had something else to do for a long time besides listening to him. When matters settled down again, the advice to attend to the French was rather unfortunately “carried over” to a state of things in which French influence was still less the influence for Germany. But this imitation, whether right or wrong, found no important critical expression, and it would be losing labour and space to devote either to German criticism in the last half of the seventeenth century.
It is more remarkable that the real activity and accomplishment of Dutch during the early part of the century did not lead to some development of vernacular criticism. But to the best of my information[[483]] it did not. The Dutch and the Germans, however, of course still continued to write in Latin, to edit, to comment, to carry on that division of critical work which, according to the laying out of our subject, lies, except at particular seasons and for special ends, beyond the scope of this book. Moreover, both Holland and some of the German Free-towns, but especially the former country, became the adopted, as they were almost the natural, homes of those beginners of judicial criticism, who have been noticed in part at the conclusion of the French chapter of this Book. Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République de Lettres were Hollandish by domicile, as was the Bibliothèque Universelle of Le Clerc, while at Leipsic the Acta Eruditorum maintained the same principle of critical annals for nearly a century. Bayle, as has been said before, was too much of a partisan, and perhaps of a wit, for anything of his to have a judicial, however much in some senses of the word it might have a critical, character: but the less mercurial talents of Jean Le Clerc, which have been characterised under the head of the Ana (v. sup., p. 276), were very well suited to the conduct of a critical record.
[465]. I do not know any general-special books on the subject of this chapter, except those of Blankenburg, and Gayley and Scott, cit. sup.
[466]. Of course Olmucensis (v. supra, p. 27) and Cornelius Agrippa (p. 28) in strictness belong to the subject, as does Erasmus himself. But the last is too cosmopolitan, and the two first too unimportant, to make the abstraction of them from this place a great wrong to the Teutsche Nation. Ulrich von Hutten wrote on versification, but not importantly.
[467]. The Disputationes de Tragœdia of Schosser (1559) are earlier than any of these; but they seem to be pure commentary on Aristotle. I have not been able to see them.
[468]. Commentarii in Art. Poet. Horat. (Strasburg, 1576). The compiler was Johann Lobart. Sturm’s Rhetorical works are rather numerous, and range from the De amissa dicendi ratione (ibid., 1538) onwards.
[470]. De Re Poetica, Lib. iv. (Antwerp, 1565).
[471]. Ibid., Lib. vii. (Leipsic, 1595).