The _Discourses of the Painters_ took its title directly from a sort of coterie which Bodmer had founded; and was named, probably after Italian models, but indirectly, as no doubt was the coterie also, from the strong prominence in the founder’s mind of the doctrine _ut pictura poesis_. Started in 1721, the periodical was one, and the most important, of these imitations of _The Spectator_ which, as has been said, played so great a part not merely in English, but in Continental, and especially German, culture. Like the model, the copy was intended to reform manners and morals, speech and style. In the latter respect Bodmer did not merely follow Addison, but fell back to some extent on the French preceptists of “correctness,” cheerfully echoing Boileau’s recommendations of “nature,” though his eclecticism already appears in admiration of Fontenelle likewise. As Boileau himself had made awful examples of the extravagants of the Louis XIII. time, and as Addison had denounced “false wit,” conceits, and so forth, so did Bodmer take up his parable anew against the bombast and preciousness of the Lohenstein School in German. Like both, he believes thoroughly in “Taste,” though the “German paste” in him is not contented without an attempt at a more philosophical treatment of this than either the Frenchman or the Englishman had thought necessary. He makes something of a theory of Poetry as Imitation of Nature: he refines upon the doctrines about Imagination which he finds in Addison. But in all this there is not very much advance upon Addison himself. Bodmer has only been brought by Addison to the threshold of Milton, and, it would seem, not even to that of Shakespeare,[29] while the divine, the instinctive, the all-saving caution, _antiquam exquirite matrem_, does not in the case of old German poetry carry him beyond Opitz as yet. [Sidenote: _Gradual divergence from their standpoint; König on “Taste.”_] For some years, therefore, it was quite possible for Swiss and Saxons to work together. The literature of the Ancient and Modern quarrel had much influence on both; and that odd upshot of it, the Fénelonian and La Mothian dislike to rhyme, was destined to exercise a very great influence in Germany. For a time, however, attention was principally fixed on the general subject of “Taste,”[30] and a dispute, really important in its results, if not exactly in itself, grew up round a short dissertation by the Saxon Poet-Laureate König, and led, among other things, to an exchange of letters between Bodmer and the Italian Conti,[31] on the nature of this much-discussed quality or faculty. König’s work appeared in 1727, two years before the first edition of Gottsched’s _Dichtkunst_, but in the same year with a treatise on Imagination from the Swiss side, in which may be seen the first sketch of their elaborate dealings with Poetics many years later. [Sidenote: _Main works of the Swiss School._]