I find myself, perhaps necessarily from the difference of our points of view, again in disagreement with Herr Braitmaier as to the critical importance of Bodmer’s later industry (shared again in part by Breitinger) on older German literature. To me, the mere fact that Bodmer in 1748—that is to say, before the middle of the eighteenth century, and nearly twenty years before the appearance of Percy’s _Reliques_— published with his faithful double J. J. his _Specimens of Old Suabian Poetry_, the Middle High German poetry of the thirteenth century; nine or ten years later, and still before Percy, before Hurd, _Fabeln aus der Zeiten der Minnesänger_; with, later again, parts of the _Nibelungenlied_ and collections of Minnesong itself, is, as perhaps the reader knows by this time, an almost greater claim to importance in the _History of Criticism and Literary Taste_ than his earlier directly critical work, and a much greater one than the more abstract æsthetic inquiries of Breitinger even, still more of Baumgarten and Sulzer and the rest. Taken with these earlier inquiries they give him and his coadjutor a high and most memorable place in the general story of the appreciation of literature. He was certainly not a man of much—and Breitinger does not seem to have been one of any—original poetical power; he does not himself seem to have had even so much as his colleague had of learning or acuteness: and both were _echt Deutsch_ in their long-windedness and want of concinnity. But they did what they could; and it turned out that they had done a great deal. [Sidenote: _The “Swiss-Saxon” quarrel._]