[64]. Again see M. Kont for comment and the “Anmerkungen über das Epigramm,” Works, xv. 73 sq. for text. Lessing also proclaimed his admiration for Martial in his preface to the early collection of his writings, in 1753.
[65]. The not uncommon ascription even of this is a result of that unjust neglect or depreciation of Scaliger and Castelvetro and the other Italians, which we have attempted pro viribus to repair.
[66]. Lessing’s curiosity as to at least the English Drama was so insatiable that he actually translated part of Crisp’s (Fanny Burney’s “Daddy” Crisp’s) Virginia—that play, the doleful effects of whose failure or doubtful success Macaulay, according to Mrs Ellis, so much exaggerated.
[67]. That he knows and quotes the Arte Nuevo is much more surprising than that he does not fully comprehend Lope’s position.
[68]. Eth. Nic., VII. ii. 10.
[69]. I wish that M. Kont had not fallen into a common error by saying that Bernays has “proved” Lessing’s interpretation wrong in part. When will people learn, in critical discussion, to see that to “make a thing probable” is not to “prove” it?
[70]. Apparently Lessing would not have disagreed much with the reactionary modern who said that “the only really valuable articles in the present English school curriculum are Greek and Euclid.”
[71]. Not that he did not pay some attention to Old German: but it had little effect on him, and he was evidently fonder of the fifteenth century than of the thirteenth. Nor is what has been said above to be taken as meaning that Gottsched himself neglected mediæval writers. On the contrary, he studied them very carefully as a part of his general patriotic “Germanism.” Only he did not in the least feel their drift. Opinions on Lessing’s own attitude to mediæval literature differ remarkably, but I cannot see much real appreciation in it.
[72]. V. sup., [vol. ii. p. 523]. As we have seen, J. A. Schlegel had translated the Frenchman when Lessing was barely of age.
[73]. To illustrate this before going further, we may take account both of the Theatrical Miscellanies, which fill vols. vii. and viii. of the Works, and of the similar miscellanies of a more general kind contained in vol. xiv. The latter include many short reviews and notes of the kind elsewhere noticed: the former supply by far the most remarkable instance of that extraordinary industry—that mania, so to speak, for assimilating all the material furnished by older and more accomplished literatures—which is the great note of this period of German culture. Much, as was almost necessary, is mere abstract, such as in vol. 7 the above-noticed analysis of Crisp’s Virginia and the long article on the Tragedies of Seneca, where, however, there is not a little actual criticism of Brumoy, &c. The Lives of Thomson (“Jacob” Thomson) and of Destouches show us by contrast what a great thing Dr Johnson did in elaborating the biographical-critical causerie: and even the Dissertations on tragédie larmoyante give little more than a frame of Lessing’s, the painters being Chassiron and Gellert. One article in vol. 8, “Von Johann Dryden,” might have been of the very highest critical interest; but it is a mere fragment. And the “Outlines of a History of the English Stage,” though showing Lessing’s astonishing scholarship in his favourite subject, are only outlines.