The necessary retrospect of the achievement of groups and countries can be given at no excessive length. The Germans had begun criticism later than any other of the great nations; and they had hardly passed the mere “rhetoric” stage of it when France was leading Europe in the later Neo-classic phase; when England was already, under the half-unknowing leadership of Dryden, sighting the modern conditions; and when Italy and Spain were passing into a sort of temporary dotage or trance on the subject. But during the seventeenth century the influence of England had been exchanged for that of France, and this latter, itself originally recommended by Opitz with a view to the exhibition of Pléiade medicine, had got this prescription changed, by a sort of legerdemain of Time the Conjurer, for the very different one of Correctness _à la_ Boileau. Yet the doses of Ronsardism had had great effect already, and the strong romantic leaven in the Germans, their pupillary state, their philosophical leanings—above all, that restless, irresistible, unwearied craving for knowledge which characterised them—prevented them from abiding in the faith of Gottsched for any length of time. We have traced the gropings and tentatives, the successive stages of Bodmer and those about him, the arrested promise of J. E. Schlegel, that Marcellus of German criticism, and we saw how _Enfin Lessing vint_. There can, for once, be no harm in attributing part at least of the deserved prominence of this critic in German criticism to the fact that he not only exhibited eminently the two great characteristics of his countrymen in the department,—unwearied industry in study and philosophic disposition of his results,—but combined with this exhibition merits which they much more rarely possess—an intimate though irregular appreciation, a great intellectual alacrity, and, above all, a really good and pleasant style. He did not, unfortunately, help to propagate these latter qualities so much as he helped to establish and corroborate the former: but with the limitations noted above, he did a great deal in almost all ways. The opinion which assigns to him, everywhere in literature more or less, but in criticism most of all, the principal share in that enormous dead-lift of German letters which marks the middle of the eighteenth century, and which, _exceptis excipiendis_, may be said to have made Goethe and Schiller possible, is unquestionably right. And though he did not quite live to see the time when Germany had begun to repay the enormous debts which, before his lifetime and during its earlier part, she had accumulated towards the rest of Europe, he almost saw this: and he had almost more to do than any other with the counter-accumulation of the necessary funds.