Schlegel’s work is to be found in the last example of it, the “Gedanken zur Aufnahme des Dänischen Theaters,” where the good and bad points of both English and French drama, and the imitation or avoidance which they deserve accordingly, are set forth with an insight, a range, and a power of appreciation which do not come much behind Lessing, not to mention an impartiality which Lessing by no means always shows. In the Shakespeare-and-Gryph parallel Johann Elias had practically founded German Shakespeare-study, and in this piece he takes the line necessary to prevent a too one-sided pursuit of it. His actual critical achievement is not, and could not be, large; but it is precious in itself, and it shows that, had he lived, there was almost nothing at all possible in his time that he might not have done in criticism. You could trust him, I think, on the English novel, and you could trust him on German and mediæval poetry, with the certainty that, in the long-run at any rate, he would come right. [Sidenote: _Moses Mendelssohn._] Of the praiseworthy industry of Nicolai we have spoken in the last volume: and the only critic whom it is necessary to mention in any detail before passing to Lessing, who is himself in a way the critical sum and substance as well as the crown and flower of this period—Moses Mendelssohn—belongs rather to the æstheticians pure and simple. He did, however, much solid actual critical work, to a great extent in collaboration with both of the persons just mentioned. Those who are curious about him may consult the very extensive (indeed, I fear it must rather be called the disproportionately extensive) notice of him by Herr Braitmaier, who gives this learned Jew some two-thirds of his second volume, and not much less than one-third of his whole book. Mendelssohn, however, is really an important person in the history of German criticism, and probably counted for something in the development of Lessing, who was his intimate friend. He seems to have had little tincture of classical literature, but was intensely interested in modern; and was for some twenty years a constant reviewer of it. He inclines somewhat to the moral rather than to the purely literary judgment in his notices of English writers, even of Shakespeare, much more of Young and Richardson, and he was not disposed to accept the Wartonian view of Pope. Indeed, with all his merits he seems to me to be further “below proof,” from the literary point of view, not merely than Lessing but than J. E. Schlegel. The actual critical work[47] of this Moses, as shown in his collected writings, leaves us, if not in the depths of the wilderness, at any rate at some distance from the Promised Land. There is a certain amount of criticism in his _Letters_, and he illustrates eighteenth-century tendencies by writing on _Das Erhabene und das Naïve_. His general drift is very frankly displayed in the epistles of Aristes to Hylas, on “How the Young should read Old and New