Poetry,” where Plutarch’s title[48] is not more closely followed than his spirit. The treatise, though in no way contemptible, is one of those which have been described (no doubt by a reminiscence of Hobbes) as “all _-keit_ and _-lung_.” And Mendelssohn’s attitude to criticism could not be better indicated than in the following sentence:[49] “We laugh at Regnard’s _Le Joueur_ and avoid being called gamblers; we weep over the English _Gamester_ and are ashamed to be such.” Perhaps so; perhaps also not. But the symptoms, if existent, are quite compatible with the existence of any degree of literary merit in either case, if not also with the existence of none. Baumgarten, Sulzer, and some others must be relegated to the Æsthetic pound. [Sidenote: _Lessing._] The general reputations which are wholly or mainly founded on criticism are so few that it behoves the historian thereof to approach them with unusual circumspection, to “put on the inquirer’s holy robe and a purged considerate mind,” as Mr Arnold says. There is the obvious danger of merely indorsing the general opinion in a tame and banal assentation; and there is the not much less obvious (and perhaps not a little greater) danger of succumbing to the temptation of “saying something different”—of aiming at a cheap distinction by paradox or eccentricity. Perhaps it is even easier to escape these dangers in reality than to seem to escape them: more particularly in the case of Lessing, of whom, in England at least, almost every educated person knows that he was a great critic, while only specialists know much more. [Sidenote: _Some cautions respecting him._] That he was a great critic nobody can deny: but it is perhaps desirable to warn those who come to him knowing something of literary criticism already, and expecting great things in it from him, that they should not raise their expectations too high, and that they should thoroughly master certain preliminary facts. The most important of these is that Lessing’s interests were not, as the interests of very great critics almost invariably have been, either wholly literary, or literary first of all, or, as in Aristotle’s case, as literary as possible. As it was said of Clarissa that “there is always something that she prefers to the truth,” so there is nearly always something that Lessing prefers to literature, constantly as he was occupied with books. Now it is the theatre;[50] now it is art—especially art viewed from the side of archæology; now it is classical scholarship of the minuter kind; now philosophy or theology; now it is morals; not unfrequently it is more, or fewer, or all of these things together, which engage his attention while literature is left out in the cold. [Sidenote: _His moral obsession; on_ Soliman the Second.]