It is, however, only fair to say that neither Breitinger nor Bodmer fails in that critical examination of actual literature which, as it has been one of the objects of this book to show, is the most fruitful way of the critic. Bodmer’s study of _Paradise Lost_, which he translated, nay, even that of Opitz, who was edited by the pair, provided perhaps the most important element in his critical education. And whatever gaps there may have been in their literary accomplishment, they knew and used the greatest critics of antiquity. If they did not know or use all its greatest poets, they used what they did know freshly and independently. They knew French and Italian literature fairly, and Breitinger at least had studied the Ancient and Modern Quarrel. They knew something of English besides Milton, though little or nothing of “Sasper,” and their earnest and affectionate study of German literature itself, reaching by-and-by to the treasures of the “Middle High” period, is, to me at least, one of their greatest titles to credit. They may have pushed the picture-poetry notion too far—Lessing was at the door with a veritable “two-handed engine” to cut off any superfluity here. But in their time, and in all times, it could but do more good than harm. [Sidenote: _Bodmer’s verse criticism._] With the commentatorial side of their activity may be connected the four verse pieces edited with much care by Herr Baechtold in the _Deutsche Literatur-Denkmale_.[35] The two last of these, dating from the author’s latest years, when he felt himself among those that knew not Joseph— _Untergang der Beruhmten Namen_, and _Bodmer nicht verkannt_—are in hexameters, and are only pathetic curiosities. The first, _Character der Teutschen Gedichte_, 1734, with an appendix, _Versuch einer Kritik über die Deutschen Dichter_, and a second but more independent sequel, _Die Drollingerische Muse_ (Drollinger was a poet and friend of Bodmer’s who had just died), have more substantive interest.[36] They are in Alexandrines, duly arranged with masculine and feminine alternation, and contain not a little mostly sound criticism of mostly much-forgotten bards. [Sidenote: _Their later work in mediæval poetry, and their general position._]