The chief ferment, however, of German poetic and criticism of a kind did not come till towards the middle of the century and when the Thirty Years’ War was dying down (though it is thought to have been to some extent determined by the sojourning of at least one German of letters[17] in England quite in the earlier stage of that convulsion): and it took final colour from French rather than from English, partly in the form of Pléiade and Louis Treize _ampullæ_, partly in that of “correctness” (as far as the Germans could reach it) _à la_ Boileau. The earlier inquirers, such as Schottel, Zesen, Buchner, were painful and estimable rhetoricians, anxious to get German into good scholastic ways. Schottel, in his _Teutsche Sprachkunst_[18] and other works, is quite of the old fashion in compounding rhetoric-poetic-composition books with dictionary. Zesen’s _Hochdeutscher Helikon_[19] is an extremely fat little book, the component parts of which are separately paged, and sometimes not paged at all, and which discusses with the utmost care the terms of the art in metre, rhyme, stanza-building, &c., gives rhyming dictionaries first of masculine then of feminine rhymes, supplies plenteous example-verse, and finishes with a _De Poetica_ of a more general kind. Augustine Buchner[20] is still older-fashioned, and reminds one of the sixteenth-century Italians in his little tractate on the office and aim of poetry, its kinds, ornaments, &c. [Sidenote: _Weise, Wernicke, Werenfels, &c._] These are hardly at all critical; they are rhetorical-preceptist. But the later men, such as Weise, Wernicke, and Werenfels, exhibit the revolt against the school of conceit and bombast which in the later part of the seventeenth century radiates from France all over Europe. Christian Weise, _Professor Poeseos_ as he called himself, degrades Poetry in his _Curiose Gedanken neben Deutschen Versen_ (1691) to the position of a mere _ancilla_ of Rhetoric, and seems to have anticipated Shaftesbury in making “ridicule the test of truth.” His namesake, Wernicke, in the “Ad Lectorem” of his _Poetische Versuche_,[21] extols Longinus, and makes “polite” remarks on Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau. But _the_ German manifesto against the florid is the _Dissertatio de Meteoris Orationis_ appended to the _De Logomachiis Eruditorum_ of Samuel Werenfels, which appeared at Amsterdam within the eighteenth century,[22] dedicated to no less a person than Gilbert Burnet, but presents the matter of two theses composed fourteen and ten years earlier. The _De Logomachiis_ itself has a certain interest for us, as it hits among other things at frivolous and verbal criticism; but the _Dissertatio_ is all ours. Werenfels, as usual basing himself upon Longinus, without the slightest suspicion that he will be undone by his reliance, distinguishes between ὕψηλα and μετέωρα—our old friends the True and the False Sublime. He admits the importance of Imagination, but