From my point of view, however, the most important of the four is the _Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren_ by Bodmer, and next to this, the same writer’s elaborate examination, in the _Poetische Gemahlde_, of _Don Quixote_, and of that _Durchlauchstigste Syrerin Aramena_, which is one of the chief German Heroic Romances, and one of the literary achievements of the House of Brunswick, having been written by Duke Anton Ulrich. The generalities of the _Kritische Dichtkunst_ are, no doubt, as one of the characters in _Westward Ho!_ says, “all very good and godly”: but the unfortunate Gottsched, if he had had a little more wit, might so have couched his complaint of their unpracticality that it would not have been ridiculous. “Logics of Phantasy” are all very well: doctrines that the poet must be thus and thus minded are all very well. But we want _poems_, we want imaginative literature itself; and these were the most difficult things in the world to get in the first half of the eighteenth century. Bodmer, in dealing with prose fiction, recognises, as few critics had recognised, the second greatest division of the imaginative literature of the world—greater even than drama in a way, because it borrows nothing from poetry, but stands on its own merits,—the division which was at last slowly rising from the ocean where it had been so long submerged. And in the _Dissertation on the Wonderful_ he boldly unlocked the tabooed treasury wherein men had been so long forbidden to seek the true riches of poetry. There was the real _labor_, the real _opus_. It is not too much to say that the prevailing doctrine—during the seventeenth century increasingly, and at the beginning of the eighteenth as a recognised orthodoxy—made poetry almost impossible. In spite of the grudging permission of such inadequate safety-valves as _furor poeticus_, _beau désordre_, “lucky license,” and the rest, this doctrine was that even the _Wunderbar_ had got to submit itself to the _Wahrscheinlich_, with a very distinct understanding that it was far the safer way to attend to the Verisimilar and let the Wonderful alone. Even Bodmer himself seems to have been rather led to a sounder creed by his admiration for Milton and his revolt against such things as Voltaire’s condemnation of parts of _Paradise Lost_,[34] than by a clear, straightforward apperception of the prerogative of Wonder. Even he proceeds rather by extension of “machinery,” by pointing out the capabilities and interest of the use of Angels and the like, than by any thorough-going anticipation of the Coleridgean “suspension of disbelief.” But this was very natural and almost necessary: while it may be pointed out that his attention to the Prose Romance—in which, for this reason or that, the unexpected and the exceptional had always held rather a prominent place—tended in the same direction as his doctrine of the Wonderful in Poetry. [Sidenote: _Special criticisms of both._]