sohn, and he neglected nothing which could give worth and dignity to the character of the noble Jew.

Nathan, surnamed among his people the Wise, is a merchant possessing great wealth, and living at Jerusalem with his adopted daughter, Recha, and her nurse, Daja. He has gone on a journey; during his absence a fire consumes his house, and Recha would have perished had she not been rescued by a Knight Templar, who saves her from the flames and disappears from sight, but not from the memory of the maiden. The Jew returns, and is summoned before Saladin, who is in need of money and accepts a loan from him; and in this scene the story of the "Three Rings," beginning, "Vor grauen Jahren lebt' ein Mann im Osten," which is the keynote of the whole piece, is told by Nathan to the Sultan.

Lessing did not invent the story himself. Boccaccio tells nearly the same tale of Saladin, and in the eleventh century it was attributed to a Spanish king.

Saladin in Lessing's play, asks which is the preferable of the three religions, Mohammedanism, Judaism, or Christianity? And Nathan in reply tells his story :

There was once a man who possessed a ring, which had the secret property of making its wearer agreeable to God and man.

This ring passed on through generations, from father to best-loved son, until its possessor for the time was the father of three sons, whom he loved equally. He would not exalt one above the two others, and therefore before his death he caused two other rings to be made, so exactly similar to the original that they could not be distinguished from it. Then he died, the three sons were each in possession of a ring, and each claimed that his was the original. The sons appealed to a judge who heard their claims, and pronounced judgment. Their father, he said, had proved that he loved them equally by giving them each a ring. If the

F

real ring possessed the property of making him, who wore it with that intention, agreeable to God and man, let each prove the genuineness of his ring by the fulfilment of the purpose of the giver-let him prove himself agreeable to God and man-and, after thousands of years, a wiser judge would pronounce the final sentence on the relative merits of the three.

Saladin was struck with the story, and treated Nathan with high honour. Meanwhile Recha, nursing her enthusiastic admiration of the Templar, whom she at first believes to be an angel in human form, and who loves her in secret, is proved to be the daughter of a Christian; and the Patriarch-a caricature of Lessing's bitter opponent Göze, an orthodox pastor-interferes to take her away from her adopted father. In the end, it is discovered that she and the Templar are brother and sister, and the children of Saladin's younger brother, who had married a Frankish lady and disappeared years ago.

The minor characters in the play are drawn with great skill. There is a dervish of wild and lawless temperament, who can bear the utmost destitution of poverty, but not the slightest restraint; a timid "Klosterbruder," the cowardly, almost dishonest Christian nurse, Daja, and the Patriarch, who has all the characteristics of a Grand Inquisitor. The fault of the detail of the play-from the standpoint of justice is the inferiority of the Christians as compared with Saladin, his sister Sittah, and Nathan. Lessing fell into an error, too common in writers who cry out against intolerance among Christians-they are themselves intolerant of the Christians. That, however, does not interfere with the artistic value of a great literary masterpiece.

Side by side with the drama, Lessing had done excellent work in other fields of literature. As a critic, his unfailing accuracy of judgment, keenness, and breadth of view,

and perfect literary taste, entitle him to the very highest rank. Lessing is indeed the real founder of æsthetic criticism in Germany, and Macaulay has justly called him "the first critic of Europe." The aesthetic writings couched in his clear language and full of his irrefutable arguments are worthy of all praise. Such are the essays:

Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet, a wonderfully keen and intelligent criticism of classic art, and the deservedly celebrated "Laokoon," in which Lessing established principles until then unthought of in Germany. The

Laokoon was called into being by the work of Winckelmann, a talented writer on art. Lessing, always inclined to controversy, in which his unrivalled critical faculty invariably allowed him to shine, combated many of the principles laid down by Winckelmann. Then, starting from the criticism of the celebrated Laokoon group in statuary, where he describes and explains every contortion of the writhing figure, and every line in the martyred brow-the "Sitz des Ausdrucks," as he styles it-he proceeds from plastic to poetic art, and lays down the most excellent rules for epic poetry. He insists on the avoidance of long descriptions, enumeration of qualities, and attractions, pointing out the superiority of Homer over Virgil in that particular, and, as a general principle, the preferability of action to mere words. The "Laokoon " is worthy of a high place not only for its style, but also for the value and soundness of its artistic teaching.

Lessing's versatile genius found manifold expression. We may mention

Fabeln und Sinngedichte, almost epigrammatical in their conciseness,

Anmerkungen über das Epigramm,

Briefe antiquarishen Inhalts, and the

Hamburgische Dramaturgie.

Lessing's life, as far as worldly success is concerned, was

by no means fortunate. The remembrance of his early quarrel with Voltaire, which was almost all the king could be persuaded to know of Lessing, prevented Frederick II. from sanctioning his appointment as librarian in Berlin. Lessing went to Hamburg, attempted there to reform the theatre, and published periodically the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie.' The enterprise failed, most likely for want of money, but what was written of the "Dramaturgie" was of the highest excellence. It was an 66 Art of the Drama," calculated to extinguish the false ideas then prevailing; it pointed out the serious defects of the French school, and their wrong interpretation of Aristotle's "Three Unities," insisted on the paramount necessity of action, and set up as models Sophocles and Shakespeare. Lessing's reform of the drama had begun with Miss Sara Sampson. In the "Dramaturgie" he produced a masterpiece of criticism, and the most important work on poetry of the eighteenth century.

After leaving Hamburg Lessing was at last made librarian at Wolfenbüttel (Brunswick). Here the least praiseworthy part of his literary work was accomplished in his bitter controversial writings against Pastor Göze, and the strictly dogmatical party. He had lately lost his wife and infant child, and his grief may have embittered his thought and warped his judgment. The controversy was stopped officially, and Lessing wrote as a noble expression of his views, "Nathan der Weise." Three years after, in 1781,

he died.

It is fitting to mention here besides Moses Mendelssohn (died 1786), author of " Phädon oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele," Lessing's other friend,

Nicolai, died 1811, one of the principal agents in the German revival of letters. He published chiefly in the "Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek," and wrote a novel, 66 'Magister Sebaldus Nothanker."

CHAPTER IX.

HERDER. STURM UND DRANG." THE YOUTH OF GOETHE.

THE YOUTH OF SCHILLER.

THE period was full of new awakening. The glory of the Second Golden Age of German Literature shone in multifarious lustre, every branch of study, every field of thought, found its respective workers, and among those who opened up new paths, disseminated new ideas in other minds and scattered everywhere fruitful seed, was

Johann Gottfried Herder.-He was born in East Prussia in 1744, and died at Weimar in 1803. Educated for the Church, he hoped through his calling to influence the great, and make himself a lasting reputation. He was full of ambition, of high aims and great thoughts, but a certain incapability of finishing the work in hand, haunted him, and prevented the realization of his greatest plans, possibly on account of their vast scope and difficulty of fulfilment, for his central idea, throughout his varied work, was the progress of the human into harmony with the divine. Herder's genius as a linguist and as a translator has never been surpassed. He possessed the rare talent of grasping the inner meaning of foreign song-of putting himself in the place of the writer, of seeing with his eyes. He studied with wonderful perseverance the sources of the most diverse kinds of poetry. His splendid linguistic talent opened to him an unexplored mine of rich treasure; he reproduced not the words alone, but the living spirit of