We saw that up to the eighteenth century, and indeed nearly up to the end of its first quarter, German criticism had done very little, and that it was never to do much in the direction of “correctness.” Indirectly, however, in the later half of the seventeenth century, when the _furia_ of the Thirty Years’ War had in a manner sunk to rest, something was done in the way of preliminary fermentation both by the late inoculation of Germany with the Euphuist-Marinist-Gongorist measles, which is there identified chiefly with the names of Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau, and by reaction against this,[14] while something further has, at least by some, been considered to have been done by Gottsched himself. [Sidenote: _Theobald Hoeck._] The works of this period are not, I believe, very common even in Germany, but the unwearied intelligence with which the British Museum has been managed for the last two generations has supplied English readers with a very fair, though not yet quite satisfying, proportion of the most important. The earliest of these authors—a predecessor of Opitz even, who might, and perhaps should, have been mentioned in the last volume—was Theobald Hoeck, or as he is called on the title-page of his quaintly-named _Poems_,[15] Othoblad Oeckhe. Hoeck makes the nineteenth chapter of his “Fair Field of Flowers” an ode of fourteen five-lined stanzas, _Von Art der Deutschen Poeterey_, which perhaps ranks next to, and certainly marks the new departure from, the vernacular Meister-song _Arts_ referred to above.[16] But the style and the gist of the piece are, I think, fairly enough shown in the following stanza— “Warumb sollen wir denn unser Teutsche Sprache[n] In gwisse Form und Gsatz nit auch mögen machen, Und Deutsches Carmen schreiben, Die Kunst zu treiben Bey Mann und Weiben?” But it is hard for the poet when he has both metre and rhyme to look to— when “Mann muss die _Pedes_ gleich so wol scandiren Den dactylum und auch Spondaeum rieren,” and at the same time see that his rhymes are proper. The thing is interesting as exhibiting modern German poetry in the go-cart with laudable anxiety on the part of the infant to go rightly. [Sidenote: _Weckherlin and others._]