It is, I think, Herr von Antoniewicz, the very learned and able editor of J. E. Schlegel, who accounts[258] for the strong abstract and æsthetic tendency of German eighteenth-century criticism, both then and since, by the fact that the originators of it had nothing to look back upon, nothing to “tie themselves on to,” and that they therefore struck out into the deep, _ripæ ulterioris amore_, as we may say, to tag his saying. This is ingenious, and it becomes more illuminative when we compare the facts with the corresponding facts in English criticism. We, too, though we had in Dryden and Jonson a good deal more than the Germans had, possessed little critical starting-point. But we had, what the Germans had not, abundance of really great writers upon whom to fix practical and real critical examinations. It is half pathetic and half ludicrous to see the efforts that Bodmer and Gottsched and their contemporaries make to provide themselves with subjects of the kind out of people like Besser and Neukirch and Amthor, like Lohenstein and Hofmanswaldau, even like the excellent Opitz: and we cannot wonder that they, or at least others, dropped off these unsucculent subjects into the pure inane. But the fairer Callipolis of English criticism could feed and grow fat on Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Dryden always, and by degrees on all the recovered wealth of older English literature. The Germans had nothing (save Luther and a few more not of the absolutely first class or even a very high second) but that mediæval literature and those ballads which naturally they did not reach at once. And even these, much good as they did them, had not the inestimable _alterative_ value of older as compared with newer English literature. [Sidenote: _Baumgarten._] On the other hand, they had, as we have said, an unconquerable desire and a dogged determination to learn and to improve themselves: the very poverty of their own literature drove them to compare and abstract others; and they possessed, in the Wolffian philosophy, a strong and serviceable instrument of method. Breitinger, with whom we have dealt sufficiently in his general critical aspect, may perhaps have the credit of the first distinct and extensive attempt to busy himself with the theory of art and letters: to Baumgarten is always attributed that of having put the name “Æsthetic” into currency, and of having got the thing—if it may be called a thing—into formal and regular shape. He used the word in a thesis, _De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus_,[259] as early as 1735, about midway between the time when the Zürich men turned their attention seriously to poetry and imagination in the abstract, and the issue of their main body of work in 1740-41. But it was not till fifteen years later, at the exact middle of the century, that he began to publish his _Æsthetica_,[260] redacted from lectures delivered in the interval. [Sidenote: De Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus,]