is a deep-rooted objection, which assumes if he took his extracts from Mr. Egan's Tom many forms, and extends through many rami- and Jerry; and told his readers, as he might fications. Among men of less acquaintance truly do, that no play had ever enjoyed such with the subject of German taste, or of taste in currency on the English stage as this most general, the spirit of the accusation seems to classic performance? We think not. In like be somewhat as follows: That the Germans, manner, till some author of acknowledged with much natural susceptibility, are still in a merit shall so write among the Germans, and rather coarse and uncultivated state of mind; be approved of by critics of acknowledged displaying, with the energy and other virtues merit among them, or at least secure for himof a rude people, many of their vices also; in self some permanency of favour among the particular, a certain wild and headlong temper, million, we can prove nothing by such inwhich seizes on all things too hastily and im- stances. That there is so perverse an author, petuously; weeps, storms, loves, hates, too or so blind a critic, in the whole compass of fiercely and vociferously; delighting in coarse German literature, we have no hesitation in excitements, such as flaring contrasts, vulgar denying. horrors, and all sorts of showy exaggeration. Their literature, in particular, is thought to dwell with peculiar complacency among wizards and ruined towers, with mailed knights, secret tribunals, monks, spectres, and banditti; on the other hand, there is an undue love of moonlight, and mossy fountains, and the moral sublime: then we have descriptions of things which should not be described; a general want of tact; nay, often hollowness, and want of sense. In short, the German Muse comports herself, it is said, like a passionate, and rather fascinating, but tumultuous, uninstructed, and but half-civilized Muse. A belle sauvage at best, we can only love her with a sort of supercilious tolerance; often she tears a passion to rags; and, in her tumid vehemence, struts without meaning, and to the offence of all literary decorum. Now, in all this there is a certain degree of truth. If any man will insist upon taking Heinse's Ardinghello, and Miller's Siegwart, and the works of Veit Weber the younger, and, above all, the everlasting Kotzebue, as his specimens of German literature, he may establish many things. Black Forests, and the glories of Lubberland; sensuality and horror, the spectre nun, and the charmed moonshine, shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws, also, with huge whiskers, and the most cat-o'-mountain aspect; tear-stained sentimentalists, the grimmest man-haters, ghosts, and the like suspicious characters, will be found in abundance. We are little read in this bowl-and-dagger department; but we do understand it to have been at one time rather diligently cultivated; though at present it seems to be mostly relinquished as unproductive. Other forms of Unreason have taken its place; which in their turn must yield to still other forms; for it is the nature of this goddess to descend in frequent avatars among men. Perhaps not less than five hundred volumes of such stuff could still be collected from the book-stalls of Germany. By which truly we may learn that there is in that country a class of unwise men and unwise women; that many readers there labour under a degree of ignorance and mental vacancy, and read not actively but passively, not to learn but to be amused. But is this fact so very new to us? Or what should we think of a German critic that selected his specimens of British literature from the Castle Spectre, Mr. Lewis's Monk, or even the Mysteries of Udolpho, and Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus? Or would he judge rightly of our dramatic taste, But farther: among men of deeper views, and with regard to works of really standard character, we find, though not the same, a similar objection repeated. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, it is said, and Faust, are full of bad taste also. With respect to the taste in which they are written, we shall have occasion to say somewhat hereafter meanwhile, we may be permitted to remark that the objection would have more force, did it seem to originate from a more mature consideration of the subject. We have heard few English criticisms of such works, in which the first condition of an approach to accuracy was complied with;-a transposition of the critic into the author's point of vision, a survey of the author's means and objects as they lay before himself, and a just trial of these by rules of universal application. Faust, for instance, passes with many of us for a mere tale of sorcery and art-magic: but it would scarcely be more unwise to consider Hamlet as depending for its main interest on the ghost that walks in it, than to regard Faust as a production of this sort. For the present, therefore, this objection may be set aside; or at least may be considered not as an assertion, but an inquiry, the answer to which may turn out rather that the German taste is different from ours, than that it is worse. Nay, with regard even to difference, we should scarcely reckon it to be of great moment. Two nations that agree in estimating Shakspeare as the highest of all poets, can differ in no essential principle, if they understood one another, that relates to poetry. Nevertheless, this opinion of our opponents has attained a certain degree of consistency with itself; one thing is thought to throw light on another; nay, a quiet little theory has been propounded to explain the whole phenomenon. The cause of this bad taste, we are assured, lies in the condition of the German authors. These, it seems, are generally very poor; the ceremonial law of the country excludes them from all society with the great; they cannot acquire the polish of drawing-rooms, but must live in mean houses, and therefore write and think in a mean style. Apart from the truth of these assumptions, and in respect of the theory itself, we confess there is something in the face of it that afflicis us. Is it then so certain that taste and riches are dissolubly connected? that truth of feeling must ever be preceded by weight of purse, and the eyes be dim for universal and eternal Beauty, till they have long rested on gilt walls and costly furniture? To the great body of mankind this were heavy news; for, of the thousand, scarcely one is rich, or connected with the rich; nine hundred and ninety-nine have always been poor, and must always be So. We take the liberty of questioning the whole postulate. We think that, for acquiring true poetic taste, riches, or association with the rich, are distinctly among the minor requisites; that, in fact, they have little or no concern with the matter. This we shall now endeavour to make probable. Taste, if it mean any thing but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness; a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence, all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration. Is culture of this sort found exclusively among the higher ranks? We believe it proceeds less from without than within, in every rank. The charms of Nature, the majesty of Man, the infinite loveliness of Truth and Virtue, are not hidden from the eye of the poor; but from the eye of the vain, the corrupted, and self-seeking, be he poor or rich. In all ages, the humble Minstrel, a mendicant, and lord of nothing but his harp and his own free soul, had intimations of those glories, while to the proud Baron in nis barbaric halls they were unknown. Nor is there still any aristocratic monopoly of judgment more than of genius: And as to that Science of Negation, which is taught peculiarly by men of professed elegance, we confess we hold it rather cheap. It is a necessary, but decidedly a subordinate accomplishment: nay, if it be rated as the highest, it becomes a ruinous vice. This is an old truth; yet ever needing new application and enforcement. Let us know what to love, and we shall know also what to reject; what to affirm, and we shall know also what to deny but it is dangerous to begin with denial, and fatal to end with it. To deny is easy; nothing is sooner learnt or more generally practised: as matters go, we need no man of polish to teach it; but rather, if possible, a hundred menof wisdom to show us its limits, and teach us its reverse. Such is our hypothesis of the case: But how stands it with the facts? Are the fineness and truth of sense manifested by the artist found, in most instances, to be proportionate to his wealth and elevation of acquaintance? Are they found to have any perceptible relation either with the one or the other? We imagine not. Whose taste in painting, for instance, is truer and finer than Claude Lorraine's? And was not he a poor colour-grinder; outwardly, the meanest of menials? Where, again, we might ask, y Shakspeare's rent-roll; and what generous peer took him by the hand and unfolded to him the "open secret" of the Universe; teaching him that this was beautiful, and that not so? Was he not a peasant by birth, and by fortune something lower; and was it not thought much, even in the height of his reputation, that South ampton allowed him equal patronage with the zanies, jugglers, and bearwards of the time? Yet compare his taste, even as it respects the negative side of things; for in regard to the positive, and far higher side, it admits no comparison with any other mortal's,-compare it, for instance, with the taste of Beaumont and Fletcher, his contemporaries, men of rank and education, and of fine genius like himself. Tried even by the nice, fastidious, and in great part false, and artificial delicacy of modern times, how stands it with the two parties: with the gay triumphant men of fashion, and the poor vagrant link-boy? Does the latter sin against, we shall not say taste, but etiquette, as the former do? For one line, for one word, which some Chesterfield might wish blotted from the first, are there not in the others whole pages and scenes which, with palpitating heart, he would hurry into deepest night? This, too, observe, respects not their genius, but their culture; not their appropriation of beauties, but their rejection of deformities, by supposition, the grand and peculiar result of high breeding! Surely, in such instances, even that humble supposition is ill borne out. The truth of the matter seems to be, that with the culture of a genuine poet, thinker, or other aspirant to fame, the influence of rank has no exclusive or even special concern. For men of action, for senators, public speakers, political writers, the case may be different; but of such we speak not at present. Neither do we speak of imitators, and the crowd of mediocre men, to whom fashionable life sometimes gives an external inoffensiveness, often compensated by a frigid malignity of character. We speak of men, who, from amid the perplexed and conflicting elements of their everyday existence, are to form themselves into harmony and wisdom, and show forth the same wisdom to others that exist along with them. To such a man, high life, as it is called, will be a province of human life certainly, but nothing more. He will study to deal with it as he deals with all forms of mortal being; to do it justice, and to draw instruction from it: but his light will come from a loftier region, or he wanders for ever in darkness; dwindles into a man of vers de societé, or attains at best to be a Walpole or a Caylus. Still less can we think that he is to be viewed as a hireling; that his excellence will be regulated by his pay. "Sufficiently provided for from within, he has need of little from without:" food and raiment, and an unviolated home, will be given him in the rudest land; and with these, while the kind earth is round him, and the everlasting heaven is over him, the world has little more that it can give. Is he poor? So also were Homer and Socrates; so was Samuel Johnson; so was John Milton. Shall we reproach him with his poverty, and infer that, because he is poor, he must likewise be worthless? God forbid that the time should ever come when he too shall esteem riches the synonyme of good! The spirit of Mammon has a wide empire; but it cannot, and must not, be worshipped in the Holy of Holies. Nay, does not the heart of every genuine disciple of literature, however mean his sphere, instinctively deny this prin ciple, as applicable either to himself or ano-tered Baron, who still hovers in our minds, ther? Is it not rather true, as D'Alembert has | never did exist in such perfection, and is now said, that for every man of letters, who de- as extinct as our own Squire Western. His serves that name, the motto and the watchword will be FREEDOM, TRUTH, and even this same POVERTY and that if he fear the last, the two first can never be made sure to him? descendant is a man of other culture, other aims, and other habits. We question whether there is an aristocracy in Europe, which, taken as a whole, both in a public and private capacity, more honours art and literature, and does more both in public and private to encourage them. Excluded from society! What, we would ask, was Wieland's, Schiller's, Herder's, Johannes Müller's society? Has not Goethe, by birth a Frankfort burgher, been, since his twentysixth year, the companion, not of nobles but of princes, and for half his life a minister of state? And is not this man, unrivalled in so many far deeper qualities, known also and felt to be unrivalled in nobleness of breeding and bearing; fit not to learn of princes, in this respect, but by the example of his daily life to teach them? We have stated these things, to bring the question somewhat nearer its real basis; not for the sake of the Germans, who nowise need the admission of them. The German authors are not poor; neither are they excluded from association with the wealthy and well-born. On the contrary, we scruple not to say, that, in both these respects, they are considerably better situated than our own. Their booksellers, it is true, cannot pay as ours do; yet, there as here, a man lives by his writings; and, to compare Jorden with Johnson and D'Isracli, somewhat better there than here. No case like our own noble Otway's has met us in their biographies; We hear much of the munificent spirit disBoyces and Chattertons are much rarer in Ger- played among the better classes in England; man, than in English history. But farther, and their high estimation of the arts, and generous what is far more important: From the num- patronage of the artist. We rejoice to hear it; ber of universities, libraries, collections of art, we hope it is true, and will become truer and museums, and other literary or scientific in-truer. We hope that a great change has taken stitutions of a public or private nature, we place among these classes, since the time when question whether the chance, which a merito- Bishop Burnet could write of them,-"They rious man of letters has before him, of obtaining are for the most part the worst instructed, and some permanent appointment, some independ- the least knowing, of any of their rank I ever ent civic existence, is not a hundred to one in went among!" Nevertheless, let us arrogate favour of the German, compared with the to ourselves no exclusive praise in this parEnglishman. This is a weighty item, and ticular. Other nations can appreciate the arts, indeed the weightiest of all; for it will be grant- and cherish their cultivators, as well as we. ed, that, for the votary of literature, the rela-Nay, while learning from us in many other tion of entire dependence on the merchants of literature, is, at best, and however liberal the terms, a highly questionable one. It tempts him daily and hourly to sink from an artist into a manufacturer; nay, so precarious, fluctuating, and every way unsatisfactory must his civic and economic concerns become, that too many of his class cannot even attain the praise of common honesty as manufacturers. There is, no doubt, a spirit of martyrdom, as we have asserted, which can sustain this too: but few indeed have the spirit of martyrs; and that state of matters is the safest which requires it least. The German authors, moreover, to their credit be it spoken, seem to set less store by wealth than many of ours. There have been prudent, quiet men among them, who actually appeared not to want more wealth,-whom wealth could not tempt, either to this hand or that, from their pre-appointed aims. Neither must we think so hardly of the German nobility as to believe them insensible to genius, or of opinion that a patent from the Lion King is so superior to "a patent direct from Almighty This hypothesis, therefore, it would seem, is God." A fair proportion of the German au- not supported by facts, and so returns to its thors are themselves men of rank: we mention original elements. The causes it alleges are only, as of our own time, and notable in other impossible: but, what is still more fatal, the respects, the two Stolbergs and Novalis. Let effect it proposes to account for has, in reality, us not be unjust to this class of persons. It is no existence. We venture to deny that the a poor error to figure them as wrapt up in Germans are defective in taste; even as a ceremonial stateliness, avoiding the most gift-nation, as a public, taking one thing with anoed man of a lower station; and, for their own ther, we imagine they may stand comparison supercilious triviality, themselves avoided by with any of their neighbours; as writers, as ali truly gifted men. On the whole, we should critics, they may decidedly court it. True, there change our notion of the German nobleman: is a mass of dulness, awkwardness, and false that ancient, thirsty, thickheaded, sixteen-quar-susceptibility in the lower regions of their lite matters, we suspect the Germans might even teach us somewhat in regard to this. At all events, the pity, which certain of our authors express for the civil condition of their brethren in that country, is, from such a quarter, a superfluous feeling. Nowhere, let us rest assured, is genius more devoutly honoured than there, by all ranks of men, from peasants and burghers up to legislators and kings. It was but last year that the Diet of the Empire passed an act in favour of one individual poet: the final edition of Goethe's works was guarantied to be protected against commercial injury in every state of Germany; and special assurances to that effect were sent him, in the kindest terms, from all the Authorities there assembled, some of them the highest in his country or in Europe. Nay, even while we write, are not the newspapers recording a visit from the Sovereign of Bavaria in person, to the same venerable man; a mere ceremony, perhaps, but one which almost recalls to us the era of the antique Sages and the Grecian Kings? that "it is not the finding of truth, but the honest search for it, that profits." We confess, creed of that man who reckoned Lessing other we should be entirely at a loss for the literary than a thoroughly cultivated writer; nay entitled to rank, in this particular, with the most distinguished writers of any existing nation. As a poet, as a critic, philosopher, or controversialist, his style will be found precisely such as we of England are accustomed to admire most; brief, nervous, vivid; yet quiet, without glitter or antithesis; idiomatic, pure without purism, transparent, yet full of chasentence," says Horn, and justly, "is like a racter and reflex hues of meaning. "Every phalanx;" not a word wrong placed, not a word that could be spared; and it forms itself so calmy and lightly, and stands in its completeness, so gay, yet so impregnable! As a poet he contemptuously denied himself all merit; but his readers have not taken him at his word: here, too, a similar felicity of style attends him; his plays, his Minna von Barnhelm, his Emilie Galoti, his Nathan der Weise, have a genuine and graceful poetic life; yet no works known to us in any language are purer from exaggeration, or any appearance of falsehood. They are pictures, we might say painted not in colours, but in crayons; yet a strange attraction lies in them; for the figures are grouped into the finest attitudes, and 'rue and spirit-speaking in every line. It is wh his style chiefly that we have to do here; yet we must add, that the matter of his works is not less meritorious. His Criticism and philosophic or religious Skepticism were of a higher mood than had yet been heard in Europe, still more in Germany: his Dramaturgie first exploded the pretensions of the French theatre, and, with irresistible conviction, made Shakspeare known to his countrymen; preparing the way for a brighter era in their literature, the chief men of which still thankfully look back to Lessing as their patriarch. His Laocoon, with its deep glances into the philosophy of Art, his Dialogues of Free-masons, a work of far higher import than its title indicates, may yet teach many things to most of us, which we know not, and ought to know. rature: but is not bad taste endemical in such | but the battle; as indeed himself admits to us, regions of every literature under the sun? Pure Stupidity, indeed, is of a quiet nature, and content to be merely stupid. But seldom do we find it pure; seldom unadulterated with some tincture of ambition, which drives it into new and strange metamorphoses. Here it has assumed a contemptuous trenchant air, intended to represent superior tact, and a sort of allwisdom; there a truculent atrabilious scowl, which is to stand for passionate strength: now we have an outpouring of tumid fervour; now a fruitless, asthmatic hunting after wit and humour. Grave or gay, enthusiastic or derisive, admiring or despising, the dull man would be something which he is not and cannot be. Shall we confess, that, of these too common extremes, we reckon the German error considerably the more harmless, and, in our day, by far the more curable? Of unwise admiration much may be hoped, for much good is really in it but unwise contempt is itself a negation; nothing comes of it, for it is nothing. To judge of a national taste, however, we must raise our view from its transitory modes to its perennial models; from the mass of vulgar writers, who blaze out and are extinguished with the popular delusion which they flatter, to those few who are admitted to shine with a pure and lasting lustre; to whom, by common consent, the eyes of the people are turned, as to its lodestar and celestial luminaries. Among German writers of this stamp, we would ask any candid reader of them, let him be of what country or what creed he might, whether bad taste struck him as a prevailing characteristic. Was Wieland's taste uncultivated? Taste, we should say, and taste of the very species which a disciple of the Negative School would call the highest, formed the great object of his life; the perfection he unweariedly endeavoured after, and, more than any other perfection, has attained. The most fastidious Frenchman might read him, with admiration of his merely French qualities. And is not Klopstock, with his clear enthusiasm, his azure purity, and heavenly, if still somewhat cold and lunar light, a man of taste? His Messins reminds us oftener of no other poets than of Virgil and Racine. But it is to Lessing that an Englishman would turn with the readiest affection. We cannot but wonder that more of this man is not known ed, in this respect, nearly, every one, we do With Lessing and Klopstock might be joinamong us; or that the knowledge of him has not say of their distinguished, but even of their not done more to remove such misconceptions. tolerated contemporaries. The two Jacobis, Among all the writers of the eighteenth cen-known more or less in all countries, are little tury, we will not except even Diderot and known here, if they are accused of wanting David Hume, there is not one of a more com- literary taste pact and rigid intellectual structure; who thinkers or poets, to be regarded and admired These are men, whether as more distinctly knows what he is aiming at, for their mild and lofty wisdom, the devoutness, or with more gracefulness, vigour, and pre- the benignity and calm grandeur of their phicision sets it forth to his readers. He thinks losophical views. In such, it were strange if with the clearness and piercing sharpness of among so many high merits, this lower one of a the most expert logician: but a genial fire just and elegant style, which is indeed their pervades him, a wit, a heartiness, a general natural and even necessary product, had been richness and fineness of nature, to which most wanting. We recommend the elder Jacobi no logicians are strangers. He is a skeptic in less for his clearness than for his depth; of the many things, but the noblest of skeptics; a younger, it may be enough in this point of mild, manly, half-careless enthusiasm strug- view to say, that the chief praisers of his earlier gles through his indignant unbelief: he stands poetry were the French. Neither are Hamann before us like a toilworn, but unwearied and and Mendelsohn, who could meditate deep neroic champion, earning not the conquest thoughts, defective in the power of uttering them with propriety. The Phædon of the latter, | that their views of it are not only dim and perin its chaste precision and simplicity of style, plexed, but altogether imaginary and delusive. may almost remind us of Xenophon: Socrates, It is proposed to School the Germans in the to our mind, has spoken in no modern language Alphabet of taste; and the Germans are also like Socrates, as here, by the lips of this wise ready busied with their Accidence! Far from and cultivated Jew.* being behind other nations in the practice or Among the poets and more popular writers science of Criticism, it is a fact, for which we of the time, the case is the same: Utz, Gellert, fearlessly refer to all competent judges, that Cramer, Ramler, Kleist, Hagedorn, Rabener, they are distinctly, and even considerably, in Gleim, and a multitude of lesser men, whatever advance. We state what is already known to excellences they might want, certainly are not a great part of Europe to be true. Criticism chargeable with bad taste. Nay, perhaps of has assumed a new form in Germany; it proall writers they are the least chargeable with ceeds on other principles, and proposes to itself it a certain clear, light, unaffected elegance, a higher aim. The grand question is not now a of a higher nature than French elegance, question concerning the qualities of diction, the it might be, yet to the exclusion of all very coherence of metaphors, the fitness of sentideep or genial qualities, was the excellence ments, the general logical truth, in a work of they strove after, and, for the most part, in a art, as it was some half century ago among fair measure attained. They resemble Eng- most critics. Neither is it a question mainly of lish writers of the same, or perhaps an earlier a psychological sort, to be answered by discoverperiod, more than any other foreigners: aparting and delineating the peculiar nature of the from Pope, whose influence is visible enough, poet from his poetry, as is usual with the best Beattie, Logan, Wilkie, Glover, unknown per- of our own critics at present; but it is, not inhaps to any of them, might otherwise have al- deed exclusively, but inclusively of those two most seemed their models. Goldsmith also other questions, properly and ultimately a would rank among them; perhaps, in regard to question on the essence and peculiar life of true poetic genius, at their head, for none of the poetry itself. The first of these questions, them has left us a Vicar of Wakefield; though, as we see it answered, for instance, in the in regard to judgment, knowledge, general ta- criticisms of Johnson and Kames, relates, lent, his place would scarcely be so high. strictly speaking, to the garment of poetry; the second, indeed, to its body and material exist ence, a much higher point; but only the last to its soul and spiritual existence, by which alone can the body, in its movements and phases, be informed with significance and rational life. The problem is not now to determine by what mechanism Addison composed sentences, and struck out similitudes, but by what far finer and more mysterious mechanism Shakspeare organized his dramas, and gave life and individuality to his Ariel and his Hamlet. Wherein lies that life; how have they attained that shape and individuality? Whence comes that empyrean fire, which irradiates their whole being, and pierces, at least in starry gleams, like a liviner thing, into all hearts? Are these dramas of his not verisimilar only, but true; nay, truer than reality itself, since the essence of unmixed reality is bodied forth in them under more expressive symbols? What is this unity of theirs ; and can our deeper inspection discern it to be indivisible, and existing by necessity, because each work springs, as it were, from the general elements of all Thought, and grows up therefrom, into form and expansion, by its own growth? Not only who was the poet, and how did he compose; but what and how was the poem, and why was it a poem and not rhymed eloquence, creation and not figured passion? These are the questions for the critic. Criticism stands like an interpreter between the inspired and the uninspired; be tween the prophet and those who hear the melody of his words, and catch some glimpse of their material meaning, but understand not their deeper import. She pretends to open for us this deeper import; to clear our sense that it may discern the pure brightness of this eter nal Beauty, and recognise it as heavenly, under all forms where it looks forth, and reject, as The same thing holds, in general, and with fewer drawbacks, of the somewhat later and more energetic race, denominated the Göttingen School, in contradistinction from the Saxon, to which Rabener, Cramer, and Gellert directly belonged, and most of those others indirectly. Hölty, Bürger, the two Stolbergs, are men whom Bossu might measure with his scale and compasses as strictly as he pleased. Of Herder, Schiller, Goethe, we speak not here: they are men of another stature and form of movement, whom Bossu's scale and compasses could not measure without difficulty, or rather not at all. To say that such men wrote with taste of this sort, were saying little; for this forms not the apex, but the basis, in their conception of style; a quality not to be paraded as an excellence, but to be understood as indispensable, as there by necessity, and like a thing of course. In truth, for it must be spoken out, our opponents are so widely astray in this matter, The history of Mendelsohn is interesting in itself, and full of encouragement to all lovers of self-improvement. At thirteen he was a wandering Jewish beggar, without health, without home, almost without a language, for the jargon of broken Hebrew and provincial German which he spoke could scarcely be called one. At middle age, he could write this Phedon; was a man of wealth and breeding, and ranked among the teachers of his age. Like Pope, he abode by his original creed, though often Bolicited to change it: indeed, the grand problem of his life was to better the inward and outward condition of his own ill-fated people; for whom he actually accomplished much benefit. He was a mild, shrewd, and worthy man; and might well love Phædon and Socrates, for his own character was Socratic. He was a friend of Lessing's: indeed a pupil; for Lessing having accidentally met him at chess, recognised the spirit that lay struggling under such incumbrances, and generously undertook to help him. By teaching the poor Jew a little Greek he disenchanted him from the Talmud and the |